The University Art Museum presents History lessons in its main galleries featuring 15 artists working from the 1960s to the present, and Vito Acconci’s sound work Under-History Lessons (1976) in the Collections Study Space.

The 15 artists in History lessons share new ways to make, shape, and preserve history. They situate themselves as subjects in history and literature, writing counternarratives as they speak to larger systemic questions about how we teach and remember the past. Working in a range of media and across generations from the 1960s to the present, they share commitments to collaboration, activism, and education. Handmade and printed texts that appear in their work recall a range of sources, from protest signs to newspapers, and challenge the way that history texts have been written.

Revisiting past events that deeply affect the present, such as Native histories and colonization, the American Civil War, and the AIDS crisis, these artists use creative processes to reveal hidden truths not accessible through traditional historical methodologies and often reference other art forms that do the same, including music, poetry, theater, and fiction.

These artists use several strategies to reclaim their power to rewrite history. Remixing, appropriation, and collage are often means of generating new forms and eliciting new meanings from archival materials. Erasure and redaction can paradoxically invite closer readings by pointing toward what was left unwritten or has been absent from history. Wordplay and humor allow artists to upend language, disrupting the way histories and identities have been previously constructed.

Education and collaboration are central to the practices of many of the artists in History lessons. They show how art can be a way of teaching others to assert their own voices in history. The goal is not to be didactic, but to plant new seeds, to create alternative ways of framing history, and to use the lessons of the past to imagine how the present world could be made better.

Artists: Judith Braun, Colin Chase, Bethany Collins, Daniela Comani, Demian DinéYazhi’, General Idea, Jeffrey Gibson, Leon Golub, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Louise Nevelson, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Tim Rollins and K.O.S.