Why do people become art historians?
About this video
Five art historians explain what they study and why. Their topics range from 19th-century European art and surrealism to art after the Spanish Conquest, pre-Columbian and Latin American art, and Jesuit missions in the 17th century. A shared thread is that art shows how people make sense of change, other cultures and their own societies.
You'll be able to
- name several different areas that art historians study.
- explain how studying art of the past helps us understand the present.
- identify a common reason art historians give for their work.
Key words
- surrealism
- A modern art movement interested in dreams and the unexpected, which one historian connects to fashion.
- pre-Columbian art
- Art made in the Americas before Europeans arrived.
- colonization
- When one country takes control of another land and its people.
- Jesuit order
- A Catholic religious group that sent missions around the world from the 1500s onward.
Transcript
(jazzy music) - [Commentator] What do you study and why do you study it?
- [Susana] Specifically I study 19th-century European art. The 19th century is a history of tremendous change. I like to see how humans deal with the world visually and how they problem solve and communicate across cultures.
- [Rachael] I study how surrealism connects to fashion, because what I'm interested in is how modern artists were dealing with this question of what is the role of art in a society that is increasingly devaluing art and looking instead to popular media.
- [Derek] I study the art that was made after the Spanish Conquest. The conquest and colonization of the Americas was a pivotal moment in world history and thinking about the art that helped to negotiate colonial society, both on behalf of the native people who lived in the Americas and the Europeans who arrived after the conquest, helps us understand how we got where we are today.
- [Kim] I'm a specialist in pre-Colombian art. Living in California, there's this deep legacy of indigenous cultures and ruins and stories of conquest. Over the years I've also become very interested in Latin American art. In today's political context, changing how we perceive our neighbors to the south would be a great benefit to society.
- [Rachel] My research in in the 17th century and I study the art of the global missions of the Jesuit order because it is a way to think about how the world was becoming a little bit more interconnected and how people reacted to new cultures and new people that they sometimes had no way of understanding and art was often the way in which people were processing this new knowledge and information about places that they had never conceived of before.
(jazzy music)
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