ABOUT /
Reimagining
Art History
Why arts of the Americas?
At the School of Art, we are committed to thinking about the arts and creative practice in a global context. But we believe that a specialty in arts of the Americas allows us to best meet an urgent need in art history departments, museums, and the broader art world today: to expand the range of perspectives included in our art institutions, and to examine the legacies of Western canon formation on collecting practices and art historical pedagogy. Our program educates students to productively intervene in this inheritance.
- How might an emphasis on the Americas diversify the knowledge systems recognized and cultivated by art historical research?
- How can we foreground transnational and transcultural narratives over nationalist ones that risk reinscribing center and periphery hierarchies?
- What can we learn from contemporary artists who are interrogating art world structures that marginalize or repress difficult institutional histories?
- How can we use the university and the museum as a training ground for refocusing interpretive energy in ways that matter to the lived experiences of creators and other art workers?
These are some of the questions animating the thinking behind our partnership with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in a graduate program that prepares students to grapple with what art history means and can do in the twenty-first century.
About
Our innovative pedagogy takes a thematic approach to course distribution requirements, offers professional development through our partnerships, and incorporates travel to inspire personal growth among students and an appreciation for diverse practices and perspectives.
Approaching art history as a contested field of ideas, sites, and ways of working, we seek to give students the tools they need to analyze the perceptual systems of the past and recognize the implications of these systems in the present. Courses tap into the critical concerns of today while providing a solid grounding in art’s complex histories around the world. Students are encouraged to develop their own unique voices as they explain creative cultural production and analyze the contributions of artists to society.
Themes
In addition, students take graduate courses informed by one or more of the following themes, which we consider fundamental to an understanding of arts of the Americas in a global context. These themes reflect the program’s central concern with promoting critical thinking about art-world and social structures, transnational and transcultural networks of relation, and diverse perspectives on knowledge production and modes of creativity.
Students define how each graduate course fulfills a specific theme through a self-assessment written at the end of the semester. Although most courses will touch on multiple themes, students may designate a particular course for no more than two themes. This model of self-assessment gives students a role in designating how courses fulfill key themes and helps them to communicate their interests and goals as they proceed through the program.
- Environment (speaks to land, nature, climate change, resource stewardship)
- Heritage (speaks to ancestral lineages and legacies, invented traditions, the life of objects and ideologies, questions of authenticity, materials and making)
- Power (speaks to rights issues, social and political imbalances and inequities, race relations and racism, imperialism and nation building, colonization and decolonization)
- Circulation (speaks to the movements and migrations of people, objects, and ideas across space and time; transculturation and globalization; value and mobility; markets)
- Structures and Systems (speaks to institutions and the mechanisms that organize and legislate experience; systemically maintained social privileges and oppressions; systems of signification; intersections between art and science)
- Identity and Community (speaks to identity formation, individual subjectivities, intersectionalities, kinship networks, social worldmaking, community protocols, imagined and real communities)
Students may also take courses outside of the program’s key themes or emphasis on the Americas. These may be very specialized ARHS seminars or courses that fall outside of art history, in allied disciplines. African and African American Studies offers a graduate certificate, which art history MA students may also consider pursuing. For specific program requirements, course information, and other details, see the School of Art website hosted by the University of Arkansas.
Funding
Thanks to a transformational gift from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, all graduate students accepted into the program will receive funding support during the two years of study. For more information visit the art.uark.edu website.