The discipline of art history and field of visual culture studies move across a spectrum of social and historical contexts and conceptual frameworks. Students taking courses in AHVCS focus on histories of artistic production and material culture. They investigate the lives of images, artifacts, and built environments, and consider how visual practices have shaped values, experience, identity and action.
Whitman College offers major and minor study programs in art history and visual culture studies. Both programs present a flexible and rigorous curriculum that incorporates perspectives from other fields, including Environmental Studies, Asian Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies, and German Studies. Our courses enable students to explore, understand and evaluate topics as diverse as the form and function of early Indo-Islamic architecture, European design theory and production, art and urban revitalization, and decolonizing the museum. Major and minor students become familiar with the history and historiography of visual texts, and contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to the study of representation in its multiple forms.
Annotations & Announcements
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Curator of Palm Springs Art Museum visits Whitman
October 5, 2018 • Curator of Palm Springs Art Museum visits Whitman
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Groundbreaking Publication on 16th Century Indian Painting
September 12, 2018 • The research of Prof. Gulbransen was recently featured in Artibus Asiae, a leading peer-reviewed Asian art journal.
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Celebrating Prof. Crockett's retirement with good modernist eats
June 21, 2018 • A snapshot from Prof. Crockett's retirement party.
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Prof. Gulbransen on Worshipping the Sun
June 20, 2018 • As part of her sabbatical, Prof. Gulbransen delivered a public lecture at Vassar College last Spring entitled "Prayer, Performance, & Politics: Portraits of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Worshipping the Sun."