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The College of Arts & Sciences
The Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University prepares students to undertake journeys into visual culture through traditional areas of study such as ancient, Medieval and Renaissance art, as well as through the integration of recent fields of theory and research. Students explore the history of cultural interactions as manifested in visual culture both inside and outside the West, from antiquity to present.
Note on teaching during COVID in the Department of History of Art:
History of Art is a discipline that depends on the viewing and discussion of images. Due to technical constraints in many of our classrooms, faculty and instructors are often unable to project their lectures via Zoom in accompaniment to physical teaching. For the same reason, recording lectures for viewing later is also not always possible.
Students missing classes due to COVID precautions are advised to keep up with the syllabus, readings, and other Canvas and library resources available to them, so as not to fall behind during their physical absence from class.
From 1991 to 2018, the History of Art Majors’ Society (HAMS) provided a way for Cornell history of art majors to enhance their knowledge about the discipline of art history beyond the classroom. These students met at the Johnson Museum one evening each week throughout the academic year to develop an annual exhibition drawn from the permanent collection and to research, write, and publish an accompanying exhibition brochure.
Browse recent exhibits via the links below:
For centuries, artists have told and retold the complex histories of the African Diaspora. Afro-Atlantic Histories (April 10 – July 17, 2022) takes an in-depth look at the historical experiences and cultural formations of Black and African people since the 17th century.
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Lara Fresko Madra PhD ’22 was awarded a Metropolitan Museum Fellowship. Every spring the Met’s Fellow share new avenues of research. This year’s colloquium was May 16-26 via Zoom.
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Sara teaches classes on contemporary art, art and ecology, and the Latin American avant-garde. She is also working on a book project.
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The Visual Arts Administration MA at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development was the first in the US to focus on visual arts management careers in both traditional and alternative contexts.
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Kremnitzer is a Research Associate in the Painting and Sculpture of Europe department at the Art Institute of Chicago where she works on nineteenth-century exhibitions and catalogues. Most recently, she was part of the curatorial team responsible for Monet and Chicago (2020) and Manet and Modern Bea...
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The “Sculpture Shoppe” exhibition displays selections from Cornell’s plaster cast collection of Greco-Roman sculptures alongside – and sometimes within – contemporary artists’ responses to cast culture and classical art.
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ARTH FWS student Ashley Koca '25 publishes essay in Fenjan journal of Near Eastern Studies.
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