Association Goals
General Infrastructure
The Association for Art History is currently building an infrastructure through which to support its overall mission.
Towards this end, we are working together to:
Achieve broad-based membership
Distribute a professional Newsletter with periodic organizational updates
Organize annual scholarly meetings
Establish a scholarly journal
Statement of Purpose
The Association for Art History brings together professionals and students who share a central concern with art and its history. It reaffirms the significance of art history as a rigorous humanistic discipline that embraces scholarly and critical standards of the highest order.Through its Journal, its Newsletter, and professional conferences, the Association seeks to provide regular occasions for sharing insights derived from systematic study of the aesthetic, thematic, and contextual aspects of art. It strives to accomplish this through discussion, which is free of jargon, ephemeral ideology and doctrinal rigidity. By fostering openness and diversity of inquiry, the Association creates a forum for art historians from all fields. Furthermore, by asserting the importance of the philological, humanistic, and scholarly aspects of art history as a research discipline and by insisting upon the centrality of the art object itself, the Association nurtures and sustains the venerable but ever-maturing discipline of art history, while promoting an intellectually coherent approach to the comprehension of the object, its image and its meanings.