Interventionist Institutional Critique and Guerrilla Arts Practice as Art Historical Pedagogy

While the institutional politics of museums and galleries has been widely discussed, pedagogical approaches related to these issues can often feel immobilizing or disempowering, relegated towards abstractions, statistics, and discussions of institutionalized racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and so on. To address these topics, I have developed a collective, collaborative process I regularly employ in art history classes, designed to both teach about the politics of art exhibition and also to creatively intervene in these arenas. This talk will detail the development of my pedagogical practice, through which I initiate students into an anonymous Guerilla-Girls style art collective, “The Department of Homeland Obscurity” (or DOHO), so named by the first cohort to enact this idea. Each “action” the class participates in varies depending on the course content, level, and number of students. Not only does this “assignment” allow students to take ownership of their education and feel truly invested in something beyond the classroom, it is also a creative way to teach traditional lessons: a typical museum visit for a survey on American Art becomes imbued with the concept of institutional critique as DOHO members also fill out an “institutional report card” for the museum; students’ chosen paper topics are transformed into street art slogans in our “Ask me About my History” campaign. In this talk I will elaborate on DOHO and our interventions into the canons and critiques of Art History both in and out of the classroom, and discuss the necessity of teaching historical content through collaborative, community-based interventions.