Art History 207 - TRANSLATING NEW WORLDS

This course investigates how New World explorations were translated into visual and material culture. Focusing upon geographies, `anthropologies,' material objects, and pictorial and written records, we analyze how travel to and through the Americas reshaped the lives of consumers and thinkers-from food and finery (corn, chocolate, red dye, gold and silver) to published narratives and collections of objects made in the colonial Americas. Case studies are drawn from Canada, Mexico, Peru, the Great Plains of the United States and the Hawai'ian Islands. In addition to initial colonial contacts, we discuss current cultural practices-material, imagined, factual or fantastical-that arose from the first encounters, conquests and settlements. Group A