Look closer at the images and objects that shape our world
Art is everywhere — from ancient tombs and museum galleries to city murals, graphic novels and internet memes. In art history at Transylvania, you’ll learn to look closely at the visual world around you, ask questions about what you see and investigate how art and images connect with culture, history and everyday life.
You don’t need to arrive with a research question already figured out. Start with what catches your attention, whether it’s an image, an object, a place, a culture or an idea, and learn how to follow your curiosity further. As you follow those questions, you’ll learn to look for evidence, connect past and present and build an argument about what you see. Over time, the questions you pursue become increasingly your own.
What Will You Study in Art History?
What catches your attention? Anime and internet culture? Questions about gender and representation? Artistic traditions from another part of the world?
Art history takes you across places, periods and perspectives. Rather than simply memorizing artists, movements and dates, you’ll ask why images and objects matter, examine the cultures that produced them and use evidence to build your own interpretations and arguments.
Featured Art History Courses
Your questions can take you well beyond a traditional survey of art history. Courses include:
- Arts of Anime
- Art and the Internet
- Women in Art
- Chinese Calligraphy
A course might introduce the question that stays with you — and eventually becomes the subject of your own research.
Make Lexington Part of Your Art History Education
Art history doesn’t live only in books. With campus in the heart of Lexington, encounter art in galleries and community spaces while examining how it connects with people, culture and place.
Morlan Gallery presents five exhibitions of contemporary art by local, national and international artists throughout the academic year. Exhibitions, class visits and talks by visiting artists, curators and scholars introduce new perspectives and invite you to think critically about how art is interpreted and presented.
At the Susan P. Shearer Student Art Gallery, you can move from viewing exhibitions to thinking about how they’re built. Students can develop and propose exhibitions, participate in critiques and gain experience thinking about how artworks are selected, organized and presented to an audience.
Your exploration can continue throughout Lexington through gallery talks, open studios, exhibition receptions, public lectures and events such as the Gallery Hop. The city can even become part of your research: One past art history capstone examined public engagement with murals in Lexington.
Experience Art Beyond the Classroom
Seeing art in a new place can change the questions you ask about it. See artworks, museums, architecture and visual cultures in new contexts, and then bring those perspectives back to the questions you’re pursuing in Lexington.
Through the program-funded Gray Art Trip, studio art and art history majors have the opportunity to experience a major U.S. center of artistic practice. Previous destinations have included New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Denver, Pittsburgh and Chicago.
May term and study abroad courses can take your exploration even farther. Past courses have included Lights, Camera, Anime! in Japan, Drawing on Ireland, Art and Ecology in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, and courses exploring art, architecture and visual culture in Spain and the Netherlands.
An endowed scholarship program also provides support for students participating in art or art history-focused May term travel courses.
Turn Your Questions Into Original Research
By junior or senior year, a question that caught your attention can become an original art history capstone project. You’ll follow your own research interests and present your work to the campus community at the art history Capstone Symposium. Your project can take different forms, from a traditional research paper to video and other multimodal work.
Past students have investigated topics including:
- Japanese tattoo practices during the Meiji Restoration
- Public engagement with murals in Lexington
- Queer graphic novels
- Psychoanalysis in the work of women Surrealists
Your research can extend beyond the classroom, too. Art history students have received university grant funding for summer research, including archival research in San Francisco that contributed to a capstone project. Students have also presented their projects at regional and national conferences and used capstone work as writing samples for graduate school applications.
Build Professional Experience
Research a complex subject. Analyze visual information. Build an argument from evidence. Present your ideas clearly.
Build hands-on experience through for-credit internships in areas such as museum curation and administration, gallery work and exhibition preparation. Independent research, curatorial work and close faculty guidance give you more ways to test your interests and begin figuring out where they could lead.
Explore internships, graduate study, alumni paths and where your art history studies can take. [Art History Outcomes]
Take the Next Step
What will make you look closer? Visit campus to explore the galleries, experience art in the heart of Lexington and see where your own questions could lead.