Art History
Degree Option
Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in art history.
Description of Program
The Department of Art and Design helps students develop their artistic and intellectual potential, explore new areas and discover career opportunities. Drake offers intensive experiences in art and a solid liberal arts education. Students are immersed in a professional art and design environment, develop consummate technical skills and achieve formalistic and conceptual abilities in preparation for a rewarding visual arts career.
Art history majors receive individual attention from their faculty adviser and other professors who are passionate about teaching.
This program enables students to develop both the vocabulary and the conceptual framework for the analysis of artistic productions from a broad range of time periods and cultures. Students develop the research and writing skills necessary for critical investigation. Familiarity with traditional and contemporary scholarship becomes a basis for focused, independent historical art inquiry.
Unlike many comparable programs, the study of art history at Drake is fully integrated within the studio and design areas of the department. The art history major combines studio experience with an introduction to the practices, theories, and debates of the discipline. Students therefore gain experience in making images as well as in interpreting them.
The art history major prepares students to navigate the complexity of visual culture, whether past or present, by introducing them to the specialized language and strategies of image making as well as by providing them with a rigorous historical introduction to the production, interpretation and circulation of images. The curriculum employs new models of teaching and theorizing art history in order to acknowledge changes in the field. For example, unlike the longstanding emphasis on chronology in beginning surveys of art history, the introductory courses at Drake employ a thematic approach that traces formal and conceptual concerns across multiple time periods and cultures. Upper-level courses offer critical reexaminations of the categories fundamental to the founding of art history including national tradition, stylistic periods and definitions of modernity.
Requirements for Major
A minimum of 40 credit hours of courses that include the following:
| Art | Credits |
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