Major in Art History (B.A.)

At Clark, your education extends beyond the classroom. Visit the Career Connections Center to learn more about internship opportunities that complement your coursework and put your art history knowledge into practice.

The art history major provides abundant opportunities for you to learn outside the classroom: you might assist in curating an exhibit at the Worcester Art Museum, lean about book and paper conservation in Clark’s Archives and Special Collections Department, study sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, or analyze the modern architecture and design of Walter Gropius’ house in Lincoln. Every student in our major takes our Problems of Practice seminar and contributes to a work of public scholarship that serves the mission of a local arts organization. In recent years, students have contributed gallery materials for ArtsWorcester and have recorded episodes of the podcast WAMxUniversity for the Worcester Art Museum.

Many students take advantage of internship opportunities during the academic year or over the summer to connect what they’re learning with professional development. See our list of local internship placements to the right. For many students, an internship is an excellent way to experience art history in a professional setting. Some students continue their internship work into paid positions after completing the B.A. at Clark.

You can also enroll in Gallery Practice and Culture, a Problems of Practice in Studio Art course that introduces students to gallery work while they intern at the Schiltkamp Gallery, Clark’s main exhibition space, located in the Traina Center for the Arts. Students help plan, install and dismantle exhibits. If exhibit artists live locally, you might have an opportunity to interact with them and visit their studios.

In the summer after your junior year, you might be eligible for the Sara Bickman Music and Arts Summer Internship for Undergraduates, which provides financial support for summer internships for undergraduates majoring in the Visual and Performing Arts.

Other opportunities include:

Clark is committed to action-based learning, which means that as an undergraduate you can join faculty and graduate students in their research. Our faculty have research interests in these subfields of art history: Byzantine and Medieval architecture and archaeology, cultural heritage and preservation, Renaissance and Baroque art, 19th- and 20th-century painting, modern design and architecture, the history of photography, material culture, and Latin American Art.

You can also apply for funding to support your own research on a project of your choice during the academic year or during the summer.

Present Your Research

Clark’s annual ClarkFEST is an opportunity to share your research or creative work with the Clark community while you hone your presentation skills. Some projects presented by art history major students and recent alumni at Fall Fest and Academic Spree Day include:

• The Birth of a Venetian Venus: From the Page to the Painting
• Burnside Fountain: A Story of Failure
• Worcester Art for ESL Students
• Representation and Autonomy in the World’s Columbian Exposition
• Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period
• The Temple at Antiochia ad Cragum: An Examination of Roman Imperial Architectural Mouldings
• Connoisseurship 101: An Exercise in Attribution and Understanding in the Worcester Art Museum’s “Antonio Montalvo’s Wife, And One of His Sons” by a follower of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572)
• Can You Copyright a Square? Examining Kazimir Malevich’s Legacy and the Issue of Authenticity in Unattributed Art from the Russian Avant-Garde

You can also submit your research results for publication in the student-run Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal.

Every year, the Visual Culture Consortium—a collection of undergraduate art history programs in the Greater Boston Area—sponsors a symposium of superlative undergraduate research in art history hosted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In recent years, Clarkies have presented on:

• The Birth of a Venetian Venus
• Silhouettes and Spirals: Ray Johnson, Queering the Body
• American Guernica: Karl Knaths’s Defiant Cubism in the Face of a New National Identity, and the Subsequent Suppression of Avant-Garde Art
• Florine Stettheimer’s Self Portraits

At Clark you’ll get more than a great education; you’ll also be prepared for a long, productive career and life of consequence. And once you’ve completed your degree, you can join other Clark alumni who have gone on to work for great organizations and attend some of the best graduate schools in the world.

Graduate School Placement
Graduate schools attended by art history graduates from Clark include:

• Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago; M.F.A., M.A.
• Hunter College, City University of New York; M.A.
• Bard Graduate Center (decorative arts, design history, and material culture), New York, N.Y.; M.A.
• New York University Institute of Fine Arts; M.A.
• Boston University, Ph.D. in Art History
• University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ph.D. in Material Culture
• University of California, Riverside, Ph.D. in Art History
• Courtauld Institute of Art, London, M.A. in Art History
• George Washington University, M.A. in Art History
• Simmons University, M.L.I.S.
• Fulbright, Austria