In response to entrenched exclusions in the art historical canon, the pedagogical model developed in the Race-ing Art History seminar—rooted in critical race theory and decolonial aesthetics—offers a disruptive and reparative framework for re-seeing the Western tradition through the lens of race, power and epistemic omission. Drawing on works by Yinka Shonibare, Kehinde Wiley, Abelina Galustian, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Fred Wilson, the curriculum unravels the ideological operations of classic portraiture, Orientalist painting, museum taxonomies and colonial spectatorship. Artists are not only creators but also critical re-narrators: Shonibare removes heads and land to unmask colonial trauma within Rococo opulence; Wiley replaces Bourbon royalty with Black masculinity to invert sovereignty and authorship; Galustian restages Orientalist fantasies through feminist reversals; Gonzales-Day subtracts lynched bodies to highlight voyeur complicity and archival violence; and Wilson reconfigures museological display to expose absences in white memory. The power of this pedagogical arc lies in its temporal recursion—pairing 18th- and 19th-century paintings with contemporary rewritings—to show that canon formation is not neutral but strategic. The museum emerges not as a neutral repository but as a colonial device, one that artists now reprogram through affective disruption, silence, juxtaposition, and embodied critique. Through interrogating whiteness, visibility, and curatorial power, the lesson repositions the classroom as a site of epistemic activism, and the canon as a malleable system open to ethical revision.
