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Primitivism has been a preoccupation of the modern artist and citizen in the West. This course is an examination of how "the primitive" as a construction has been used in discussions of painting, sculpture, and graphic art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following the premise that "primitive" is best understood as a term that relies upon binary conceptions of high and low art, we'll consider its deployment across the social relations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity, and the historical grid of time and geography. (Francis)

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