by Ellen C. Caldwell see the complete lesson plan here In January of 2020, just before the world would be unalterably impacted by COVID-19, I had the great fortune of traveling to Rapa Nui. Having taught art history surveys with an emphasis on Polynesian and Oceanic art for over a decade, I had dreamt of this trip for a long time.  The trip did not disappoint. Seeing the moai in person was breathtaking and awe-inspiring. Getting to know the small island and ahu sites (sacred platforms and burial sites upon which the moai stand or stood) over my short time there has stuck with me and susta ..read more

Michelle Millar Fisher and Dalia Habib Linssen “Joseph Lewis as Eze Nri” (2018), Stephen Hamilton, acrylic and natural dyes/pigments on wood and hand-dyed, handwoven cloth. Image courtesy of the artist People working in museums often get asked what it is like to do their jobs. We know we do! One of us is a curator and the other is an educator—just two of many roles that ensure that the various functions of a museum operate every day (in our case, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Students at all stages of their studies, and who are considering the museum field as a future career path or as ..read more

By Aly Meloche and Francesca Albrezzi February 10th marks the beginning of a CAA annual meeting that promises to be unlike any other. Normally, many of us look forward to the annual meeting as an opportunity to catch up with colleagues from around the world and hear new ideas for research and teaching. It’s strange to think that just last year many of us were gathered doing just that. It’s even more strange to think that CAA 2020 was the last time many of us went anywhere. However, much like FATE, SECAC, NAEA, etc, the programming professionals at CAA have attempted to recreate much of what we ..read more

By Francesca Albrezzi This spring I taught two classes online for the first time, due to our current pandemic conditions. While I’ve had many years of experience working with digital tools and creating digital art history projects, the transition to distance learning provided me with an opportunity to get creative and try some things that were new. Here are a few tips and tricks that I used, which others may find useful as we continue to teach and learn in an online environment. Provide a technical assessment and a technical guide before classes start Since not all my students were going to ..read more

By Tracy Chapman Hamilton, Virginia Commonwealth University, Affiliate Elizabeth Lastra, Vassar College, Assistant Professor Screenshot from Stephanie Yang’s Artsteps Islamic Chinoserie exhibit Using the time-tested mnemonic of the “Memory Palace,” twenty-four-year-old Alex Mullen was the first American to win the World Memory Competition in 2015 (he has since won twice more). Four-time champion of the USA Memory Competition, Nelson Dellis employs the same technique, explaining that one should place “images for those words [you are memorizing] on a route around your house,” to create one’s own ..read more

By AHTR editor Aly Meloche For those of us who are just beginning to teach online, the concept of conducting scholarship of teaching and learning in addition to all of the other new responsibilities must sound about as much fun as running a virtual meeting while trying to homeschool new math. But these are important times for art history pedagogy, and teaching and learning has changed rapidly. Many of us feel like we’re thrashing in an uncontrollable tempest, seeking out the edges of our own abilities to not just cope, but to learn. And in this learning there are lessons — lessons that when sh ..read more

by David Boffa In my last years at Beloit College I was fortunate enough to participate in a curriculum redesign for the art history program, undertaken in the wake of our external departmental review. The foundation of our original curriculum was a familiar one: a two-part survey (Prehistoric to Middle Ages, Renaissance to Modern) focused on the Western canon and rooted in the models established by traditional textbooks like Gardner’s, Janson, and Stokstad. This model is a core part of the art history experience at many small liberal arts colleges (and likely at many large universities). An a ..read more

[Ed. note: As the Oxford University Research Center in the Humanities notes, this recent publication “draws on texts from recent picture and image theory, as well as on present-day Amerindian authors, anthropologists and philosophers [to] question the power structure inherent in Eurocentric art discourses and to decolonize art studies, using Brazil’s arts, its theory and history as a case study to do so.” Written by Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, Associate Professor at the Department of History of ArtFederal at the University of São Paulo, we are pleased to host a short synopsis by the author bel ..read more

Author: Xavier Lopez is a queer art history student who has attended San Francisco State University and Mt. San Antonio College. He is transferring to UC Berkeley this coming fall to pursue a B.A. in Art History. With a focus on Pre-Columbian Art, Lopez hopes to further educate himself on these Indigenous cultures along with the countless artworks they have produced prior to European colonization. As an aspiring Art Historian I should feel fortunate with having a voice in such a historical time, but I’m not. Actually, I’m upset. I’m upset at how President Trump handled the pandemic with noncha ..read more

Author: Anne Hunnell Chen, Yale University (anne.h.chen@yale.edu) In the age of COVID-19, there’s no shortage of (justified) examinations and laments of the challenges and inadequacies of teaching online. Certainly, the wholesale transformation from face-to-face to online course delivery required of instructors in Spring 2020 due to the pandemic precluded many of our more intentional practices in course design and caused myriad difficulties. But as a veteran of pre-pandemic online teaching, I am certain that with some creativity and advanced planning, remote modalities can actually offer impor ..read more