New York is a city filled with art. It can be found in the city’s many museums and galleries, but it also surrounds us in ways we might not always notice—as murals and graffiti on the city’s walls, streets, and subway stations, or as monuments in parks.

This course is about the art of New York City. It explores how New York became one of the most important places in the world to make and see art, and how artists across the five boroughs made sense of their experience of the city through radical new ways of making art, which in turn changed how they saw the world around them.

The course tells the story of art in New York across six weeks, or “units,” covering one decade per unit. In the 1960s and ’70s, artists like Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold used art as a form of activism for women and people of color. Jean-Michel Basquiat challenged the art world with street art in the 1980s, and Félix González-Torres responded to the AIDS crisis with photographs and installations in the 1990s. In the 2000s and 2010s, Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley used portraiture to criticize the history of slavery and to celebrate Black lives.