This course takes up the contested terrain of site-specific art from the mid-20th century to the present, approaching site not as a given location but as something produced through material, social, legal, and historical conditions. Taking New York City as a point of departure, we will examine how space is shaped through regimes of property, institutional authority, policing, and uneven histories of urban development and dispossession. We will look at artists and practices working within, against, and through these terms, using strategies of intervention, occupation, translation, and withdrawal, as well as research-based, archival, and narrative practices. This course asks: How is a site constituted, and for whom? What does it mean to work under conditions that delimit access, visibility, and use? How do artists navigate or refuse systems of authorization? And how might collective histories be made visible without relying on fixed forms of memorialization? Structured as a seminar/studio hybrid, the course moves between classroom and city, with students participating in discussions, readings, presentations, and fieldwork, culminating in the development of site-specific or site-sensitive projects.

In this course, we will engage with artwork across mediums that refute or deny access, give partial visual information, are only legible to some or under certain conditions—both through research and through making in the studio. This class centers visibility, legibility, and refusal in visual art. It will be divided into three sections: Legibility/Illegibility, Refusal and Opacity, and Abstraction, Figuration, and Representation. We will also study artworks that use surveillance technologies and practices to consider how surveillance intersects with each of these modes. In this class, we will consider how the conditions of opacity allow for celebratory space, the ways that legibility is connected to vantage points of viewership—as well as the artworks orientation toward that viewership— and the visual politics that trouble the line between abstraction and representation. Students will respond to selected readings, lectures, related exhibitions, and discussions by producing artworks.