Greetings and thank you for visiting our web site. Art history and visual culture has become a very exciting area in the humanities and social sciences for scholarship and teaching, and I am proud to say our department is among the most forward looking in the country. In this brief statement let me sum up our mission and our approach.
Our Mission
Our department mission is six fold. We maintain a dynamic, sophisticated, and multi-disciplinary research agenda that has produced many forward-looking publications and projects. We foster knowledge of the world-wide history of art in undergraduates from every area of the university. We prepare undergraduate majors for study at any of the nation’s finest graduate institutions. We train our graduate students for fruitful careers in teaching, museum work, and related professions. We offer lecture programs and related activities, often in conjunction with other university units (such as the Friends of Art, Fine Arts Studio, The Kinsey Institute, the Indiana University Art Museum, and the many IU area studies programs) to promote richer understandings of art and artistry in society. Finally, we reach into the community both to expand people’s comprehension of art and to support local programs and activities in areas where there is social need.
We serve the College and university student population in a number of ways. Many students take one or several of our courses while pursuing other majors. For our size we have a large number of graduate and undergraduate majors. Our graduate students look forward to productive careers teaching at the college level, serving as museum curators and administrators, and working in galleries or other areas of the art market (auction houses, art and culture writing, etc.). An undergraduate art history major provides valuable experience in critical thinking and visual training that can prove useful in a variety of careers, and as a result, we get a number of double majors (sometimes even triple majors). In addition to traditional combinations of studio/art history, art history/library sciences, and art history/foreign languages, we also see double majors who are pre-med or pre-law students. These students feel that art history broadens their critical abilities, enhances their problem-solving skills, and helps them understand and appreciate the visual complexities of the world around them.
Disciplinary Approach
In a broader sense our mission is to provide the Indiana community at IU and around the state with the resources to understand the nature of art and visual expression and put it to work in their lives. Art history has changed dramatically over the past several decades. In its earlier stages it focused on style and connoisseurship, artist’s biographies and art movements. It was confined to what we think of as “fine arts” and presented art as simply reflecting the beliefs of society and the events of history.
Art history has now become a dynamic, many-faceted intellectual enterprise, and has spilled out of the confines of “Fine Art” and into the whole world of imagery. Faculty typically undertake seven years of rigorous graduate training to develop the knowledge, perceptual skills, and sensitivity to look deeply and widely into the visual production of culture, with all of its complexity, contradictions, and contestations. Our point of departure is the critical and scientific analysis of form, which includes and integrates all its material, cognitive, psychological, and social components. To do this effectively we accrue a constantly growing knowledge of world cultures, societies, and history, and we continually seek to better understand how human beings think, engage their social and natural environments, and act in the world. Our discipline is a full participant in the development of theoretical models and methodological approaches that have revolutionized post-modern critique and scholarship in the humanities. Because imagery is so intimately part of human consciousness and so indelibly part of social reality, our discipline deploys many of the strategies also found in folklore and ethnography, literary criticism, performance and religious studies, history, and the aesthetic side of philosophy. It can also be viewed as strongly linked to cognitive science and areas of biology.
Our faculty here at IU is in the forefront of these developments. In research, teaching, interdisciplinary activities, and outreach our faculty explore and illuminate the roles of visual culture in social life and human imagination. We seek to demonstrate the ways all forms of visual expression reside within and emerge from thought; how they are fueled by and generate emotions, inspire contemplation and circumspection that often lead to personal and social action, and how they offer opportunities that viewers can use to examine their ideas and feelings, beliefs and perspectives, and their relationships to the rest of society. We show that the play of imagery and composition is a form of dialogue among people that can be used to help negotiate and understand the flow of events that compose our lives. It is, therefore, a complex and richly nuanced phenomenon that engages our most essential capacities for thought, feeling, and action. No wonder visual expression in a cornucopia of forms is prominently featured in cultures form every part of the world and in every historical epoch.
To situate visual culture in the world, we consider the components of artistry, from the use of materials and techniques, media and technologies, form and style; to the roles of expertise and experience, social environments, and historical events. We cover the broad spectrum of visual expression, including popular and folk art, commercial art and graphic design, the so-called fine arts, architecture, and increasingly the public media of film, video, and DVD, the imagery of electronic and computer games, body arts, craft, and the artistic enterprise of using aesthetics and skill to enhance the nature of our world. We present the relationships of art to commerce, politics, the realms of the spiritual, scientific observation and experimentation, the human condition and its intellectual, physical, and psychological states, the processes and perspectives that constitute society, and, permeating it all, the fundamental power of human creativity and imagination. We contextualize visual culture in its broadest artistic and social environments.
Imagery happens inside people’s imaginations and outside in the spaces we all share. It is a profound and fundamentally important part of our living experiences, and the more we understand it the better we are able to enjoy it and use it in fruitful ways.
Please enjoy our web site and do not hesitate to contact us.
Patrick McNaughton
Chancellor’s Professor of African Art History
Chair, Department of the History of Art
