This course introduces students to critical debates and historical contexts for art institutions after 1945, focusing on work engaged with installation, architecture, sociality, and performance. First, we will consider the formation and transformation of museums, non-profit and artist-run alternative space and commercial galleries. By examining different typologies of institutions—their curatorial programs, structure, spaces, and performativity—this seminar considers what Peter Burger has called "art as an institution". Second, the course offers an introduction to relationships between artistic form and institutional organization—across conceptual, embodied, moving-image and project-based forms of art—that art historians have theorized as institutional critique. Third, we will study how institutions have responded to (and incited) critical debates, relative to historical demands for accountability and transformation. By way of cultural activism and policy—including visual cultures of protest, debates on restitution and museological ethics—we will consider the changing roles of institutions in the context of racial and economic justice, decolonial, feminist, queer and transgender social movements. Coursework includes video and film screenings, the study of artist writings, cultural criticism, policy papers, ephemeral and live work, and class visits to cultural organizations in New York City. We will engage work and/or writings by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, Pierre Bourdieu, Susan Cahan, Nikita Cai, CASCO, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, Khaled Hourani, INCITE, Carolyn Lazard, Hito Steyerl, Martha Rosler, Cameron Rowland, Chin-tao Wu, Chris Vargas, and others. For Visual Studies majors, this course also fulfills the LVIS 2010 requirement.