Art Theory and Practice

Welcome to the Department of Art Theory & Practice (AT&P) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University. The department has both an undergraduate program, offering a baccalaureate degree, and a graduate program, offering a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

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2009-2010

Anna Biller | Mike Hoolbloom |
Theaster Gates

2008-2009

obadike image

Mendi and Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary practitioners whose music, live art, and conceptual Internet projects have been exhibited internationally. Perhaps most well-known for a controversial 2001 piece in which they offered Keith’s blackness for sale on eBay, their work and writing have been featured in a variety of cultural locations: in the film Take These Chains, on the album Sour Thunder, in periodicals such as Art Journal, Black Arts Quarterly, and Tema Celeste, and at venues ranging from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Yale Cabaret. They are the winners of the 2007 Pick Laudati Award, administered by the Block Museum and the Departments of Art Theory and Practice and Art History and given to outstanding artists to create new work using technology and involving the participation of Northwestern students. In March 2007 Mendi and Keith debuted at Northwestern an intermedia suite titled Big House: Disclosure, inspired by and in dialogue with the conference Out of Sight: New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination. For Mendi and Keith, “while part of recognizing the period 1807-2007 as post-slavery is realizing freedom, another part is reckoning with the ways in which slavery effects society beyond its time. We take the conference’s location in the Chicago area as an opportunity to compose a suite exploring Chicago’s role as the first U.S. city to adopt a Slavery-Era Disclosure Ordinance, which requires institutions doing business with the city to disclose whether they have profited from slavery. The ordinance not only implies that the institutions carry a responsibility for these profits, it also draws attention to the fact that this legacy is often hidden from view. Big House: Disclosure, therefore, presents acts of discovery and disclosure as a way to participate actively in the post-slavery era.” The suite is comprised of several elements: a gallery installation including a 200-hour-long house song; a public sound installation with text from corporate disclosure/apology letters and interviews with citizens; a series of art actions performed at Northwestern; and a project website offering video footage of the performances and interviews as well as a downloadable ring tone created from abolitionist texts. Northwestern undergraduates working with Professors Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson and Lane Relyea in their winter 2007 courses on race, technology and representation, were actively involved in every stage of the project, working firsthand with the artists to develop and document their intervention into the writing of Chicago’s historical relationship to the “peculiar institution.”