Professor Small’s teaching approaches contemporary art from a global perspective and traverses an expansive range of practices and discourses, from the defining movements of 20th and 21st century art to cutting-edge practices by emerging artists and experiments in exhibition-making that have transformed the field of contemporary art today. In addition to courses on selected topics such as art and politics, archives, abstraction, or experimentalism, she regularly teaches a survey of contemporary art since 1950, as well as survey of modern and contemporary Latin American art. Her courses often aim to engage actual works of art, whether in campus collections, area museums, artists’ studios in New York City, or even international exhibitions of contemporary art.
Co-taught with Rachel Price, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
What kinds of aesthetics issue forth from need? Taking its name from Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha’s 1965 manifesto, this graduate seminar investigates how practitioners and critics have sought to understand political, social, economic, and…
Taking its cue from the philosopher Nelson Goodman's suggestion that we ask not "what is art?", but "when is art?", this graduate seminar explores questions related to the temporal boundaries of works of art. Can works subside from the category of art into that of mere document or vice versa? Does "art" inhere…
Co-taught with Rachael DeLue, Department of Art & Archaeology, 2018
Abstraction occupies a privileged position within the historiography of Modernist art. Long associated with rupture, criticality, and teleology, abstraction is also a vexed term, often only precariously opposed to such concepts as representation,…
Co-taught with Cristina Freire, Visiting Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in the Program in Latin American Studies, 2019
Museums have long disciplined conducts and framed ways of seeing through the production and reproduction of dominant values. But can they also act as instruments of transformation, even emancipation…
This seminar is conceived as a practicum for developing critical approaches to the use and interpretation of archival materials, with special emphasis on the way in which archives have been deployed to construct and reconstruct the idea of Latin American art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Departing from recent…
This course examines the international mega-exhibition of contemporary art as a form of worldmaking. We investigate key moments and debates within its broader history, ranging from 19th century world’s fairs and the earliest international art biennials, to the explosion of recurring mega-exhibitions in the 1990s. We will look at how such…
What is the political capacity of art? What is the aesthetic capacity of politics? This course examines key episodes, strategies, and formulations pertaining to the complex relationship between art and politics across the 20th century. Topics include experiments in…
This seminar investigates experimental art practices that emerged in Brazil, Argentina and the United States over the course of the 1960s. Through focused, cross-cultural case studies, we explore how artists sought to use strategies of play, protest, reflexivity, and intervention to expand and even dissolve the…
Experimental art by definition involves process, discovery, contingency, and the possibility of failure. Museums, by contrast, are institutions traditionally dedicated to the care and preservation of artifacts with permanent value. What then are the possibilities for experiencing experimental work within a museum? Using recent acquisitions…
What are the environments, fictions, fantasies, and ideologies that condition the artist at work? This course takes as its investigative locus the artist’s studio, a space of experimentation and inspiration, but also of boredom, sociability, exhaustion, and critique. Structured around visits to the studios of multiple practicing artists in…
This course investigates the contested field of advanced art in the post-war period, from the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in the United States in the aftermath of WWII, to the increasingly transnational contexts of contemporary artistic production in the 21st century. We ask how artists engaged with the complex and often…
Co-taught with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Visiting Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in the Program in Latin American Studies, 2020
This course focuses on key issues and…