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
Joint program profiled in Cleveland Art
The joint program’s exciting projects have been highlighted in the museum’s members’ magazine. Read more here on the current and upcoming exhibitions and the Mellon short-term fellows program!
Recently, PhD candidates in medieval art Sam Truman and Reed O’Mara attended the opening of Lumen: The Art and Science of Light at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles! This expansive show explores the role of light in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam across the long Middle Ages. Sam worked on the show and the accompanying catalogue when she was an intern in the Getty’s medieval manuscripts department—the very same department where Reed finds herself as an intern this year! The catalogue includes Prof. Gertsman’s essay on medieval concepts of darkness.
Join us for the talk co-sponsored by the Department of Art History & Art and the Expanding Horizons Initiative on September 25 at 5 PM. Dr. Scott D. Miller, a specialist in Burgundian art, will speak about visual and material culture of late medieval itinerant courts — a fantastic and fantastically understudied topic! Dr. Miller’s visit to CWRU is part of the EHI grant supporting Prof. Elina Gertsman’s work with the Interactive Commons that aims to build a set of immersive multisensory environments.
Madalyn Fox and Jillian Kruse Published in Cleveland Museum of Art Magazine
Reed’s summer research profiled in art/sci
Reed O’Mara, a PhD candidate in medieval art, was featured in the @cwruartsci monthly newsletter. Mellon Fellow and now a curatorial intern at the Getty, Reed recounts a fabulous summer filled with research and conference travel, and funded, in part, by the International Center of Medieval Art and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. See more here!
Creation and (Re)Birth in the Global Middle Ages Opens at the CMA!
We are delighted to announce that the exhibition on Creation and (Re)Birth in the Global Middle Ages just opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This ambitious show pulls together objects from several museum collections to explore some of the fundamental moments in the sacred narratives of the medieval world. The exhibition, co-curated by Professor Elina Gertsman and Dr. Gerhard Lutz, is a culmination of several years of collaboration between the department’s medieval art program and the CMA, made possible by the support of the Mellon Foundation. Graduate students contributed to wall text, object labels, and the gallery guide. For more on the show, featured already in Cleveland Art Events and This is Cleveland, please see here.
Sarah Frisbie receives the Gulnar Bosch Travel Award
Congratulations to Sarah Frisbie who has been selected to receive a SECAC Gulnar Bosch Travel Award. The award will serve to support her travels to the SECAC 2024 conference this October. The Gulnar Bosch Travel Award recognizes merit and emerging scholarship in art, design, and art history. Well done, Sarah!
Susana Montañés Lleras’s show reviewed in the NYT
Congratulations, Susana! Susana's exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, "Fairy Tales and Fables: Illustrations and Storytelling in Art," received a rave review in the New York Times by the art critic Will Heinrich. Catch Susana's show, which is still on view through September 8th!
CWRU medievalists at Kalamazoo 2025!
This academic year, the Department will be particularly well represented at the International Congress! Take a look at the program to see Reed O’Mara’s session on Jewish Women in the Middle Ages; Cecily Hughes’s and Rebekkah Hart’s session on Scales of Devotion and Embodied Religious Experience, inspired by the directed study they completed last year; Sarah Frisbie’s session on medieval graffiti; and Prof. Gertsman’s session on medieval materialities, fueled by the graduate seminar on the same topic that she recently taught. And, of course, the Interactive Commons will bring our fabulous medieval spaces apps to the Congress as well, the Red Monastery and Immersive Realms. View calls for papers and submit your abstract here!
Erin Benay – Research Highlight
The CWRU Office of Research and Technology recently featured Prof. Benay’s work in this video! It is the first faculty spotlight to focus on a member of any Humanities department. Prof. Benay has published three books and numerous articles related to global circulation and artistic production in early modern Italy.