Identity and Identification

Visual art, visual culture, and the built environment express, construct, and expose aspects of human identity, including class, race, ethnicity, nationality, dis/ability, sexuality, and gender. Identities are formed through an ongoing process of categorization that is representative of the site between society and the body, dynamically negotiated between external conditions and individual agency. Visual culture reflects, reinforces, undermines, and reinvigorates these distinctions, ones that allow us to comprehend, experience, navigate, and act on the world.

• What can visual culture tell us about our desires to identify with or distance ourselves from others across time and space?
• How have humans used objects to reinforce or resist past and present societal power imbalances?
• Why are images of the human body so often used to stabilize or destabilize notions of identity in moments of transition and upheaval?