The Department of Art History and Art offers opportunities to study art history, to participate in a broad range of studio offerings and to engage in pre-professional museum training. The Bachelor of Arts degree is granted in art history and in pre-architecture. In addition, the department offers graduate programs leading to the degrees of Master of Arts in art history, in art history and museum studies; and the Doctor of Philosophy in art history.
All art programs are considerably enhanced by close cooperation with and access to the facilities of cultural institutions located in University Circle, in particular The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Cleveland Institute of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
The Cleveland Museum of Art/CWRU Art History Program has been in existence since 1967. The museum’s curators serve as adjunct faculty, and graduate research projects under their direction often result in exhibitions and publications. The museum Studies course and internships provide experience in curatorial practices, connoisseurship, conservation, design, and museum education, and the program has a history of producing leaders in the museum field. Graduate students are exposed to both traditional and newer theoretically based art historical approaches in classes taught by faculty renowned for their expertise in a diversity of fields.
News
Year-end message from Elina Gertsman, the Acting Chair of Art History and Art
It was a true privilege to shepherd the department during this academic year. Despite all the complexities, we have accomplished astonishing things! Both our faculty members and our graduate students garnered extremely competitive fellowships and awards, organized international conferences, spoke at a broad variety of venues, published widely, and curated exhibitions. Our studio artists, in turn, exhibited their work across the United States. Our lecture series brought extraordinary scholars to campus; the Graduate Association for Medieval Studies and the Undergraduate Art History Club held a series of fabulous events; and the Cleveland Symposium, which celebrated its 50th anniversary, was a rousing success.
Please join us on November 19 for what promises to be a fantastic lecture to be delivered by Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Brown. Titled “Islamic Ceramics and Other Fictions of Capital,” the lecture explores the fictionalized objects of Islamic ceramics collecting that suture together multiple temporalities with skill and ingenuity, creating new objects of delight for elite collectors and asking us to think again about what we value most in the artifacts of the medieval past. The lecture will be of interest to academics, museum professionals, and collectors, so please spread the word!
Cleveland Symposium 2025: schedule and keynote
The Cleveland Symposium is just around the corner! Click below to access our exciting lineup of speakers. We hope to see you there!
MA Student Lachelle Oglesby Publishes Essay in Pasts Imperfect!
Congratulations to MA student Lachelle Oglesby on the publication of her essay, "Restoring the Egyptian History of the First Neferibre Obelisk," in Pasts Imperfect. Lachelle's essay is the result of research she conducted this summer as a participant in the American Academy in Rome's Classical Summer School. You can read the...
Rethinking the Middle Ages: CWRU art historian reframes abstraction
The groundbreaking work of Prof. Elina Gertsman, Distinguished University Professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and her colleague and co-author, Vincent Debiais, Research Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, was featured in The Daily. Read here about their collaboration and about the integral role their graduate students played in this international multidisciplinary project!
PhD Candidate Arielle Suskin wins Baker-Nord Institute for the Humanities Flash Grant!
Congratulations to PhD candidate Arielle Suskin, who has been awarded a Flash Grant from the Baker-Nord Institute for the Humanities. The grant will support the upcoming exhibition that Arielle is curating related to the Kelvin Smith Library Special Collections Roman Coin Collection. Arielle is the Research Lead on the...
Medieval PiIgrimage for Gamers
Reed O’Mara, PhD candidate in medieval art and Mellon Foundation Fellow, recently completed a year-long curatorial internship at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA. While there, Reed helped to produce and write an in-gallery video game, The Pilgrimage Road. The game takes players through the Camino de Santiago, a popular medieval pilgrimage to see the relics of St. James, and was part of the exhibition Going Places: Travel in the Middle Ages. You can read more about the game and Reed’s work here.
Students publish in CAN Journal
Congratulations to Alli Boroff, a second-year MA student in medieval art and a Keithley Fellow, and Madalyn Fox, a second-year MA student in the Art History and Museum Studies program and a Barbato Fellow on their publications in CAN Journal! Alli’s piece is a review of Pintoricchio Magnified: An...
Please join us in congratulating Professor Elina Gertsman, Distinguished University Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, on the publication of L’hypothèse abstraite – Écart, excès d’image au Moyen Âge, co-authored with Dr. Vincent Debiais (EHESS)! The book is the culmination of their collaborative project on abstraction in medieval art, which had its genesis in the French-American Cultural Exchange Foundation grant, and resulted in a series of publications, workshops, and symposia held on both sides of the Atlantic. L’hypothèse abstraite explores abstraction as a mode of representation in medieval images that seek to figure unrepresentable truths. Its focus is on the intellectual process of abstraction as the means of accessing knowledge that lies beyond the senses and trips up operations of cognition and perception. The book does not posit medieval abstraction as a reaction to figuration; on the contrary, abstraction is seen as the driving force of figuration, which emphasizes the effects of representation and establishes the image as an image. It is the testimony to a visual process that frees itself from mimesis in favor of a poetics of the gap, engaging with the world that is complex and subtle — the process that undermines the fragile equivalences between what we see and what we know. The preface to the book was authored by Herbert L. Kessler. Read excerpts here.
