Undergraduates within the History of Art Department are encouraged to incorporate experiences abroad into their curriculum. Students may apply to programs both within and outside of Ohio State.
The Office of International Affairs can help students explore options for studying abroad. Opportunities are available for the entire year, a single semester, May session, and summer. Many study abroad courses may be counted towards the major or minor in History of Art.
The History of Art Department also offers three study abroad programs led by its faculty members; offerings in the coming years should include The Arts of Japan in Tokyo and Kyoto, Medieval Art in Rome, Siena, and Florence, and The Art of Paris: Gothic Cathedrals.
The Arts of Japan with Professor Namiko Kunimoto will be offered in Summer 2020.
Many courses within History of Art incorporate some form of work outside the classroom. Galleries in and around Columbus (including the Columbus Museum of Art and the renowned Wexner Center for the Arts) are easy day trips for students to experience first-class exhibits. Some courses, however, take students to various other locations all around the nation.
Cleveland Museum of Art
During Autumn semester 2016, as part of her course HISTART 5222 Later Islamic Art, ACLS Post-doc Fellow Emily Neumeier took 12 undergrads to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Together they saw the Islamic galleries, which also included contemporary art by Lalla Essaydi and Afruz Amighi. They visited the special exhibition "Art and Stories from Mughal India," as well. After the trip, students were asked to design multimedia tours exploring different themes in Islamic art, and incorporated video, 3D models, and proposals for interactive features that could be implemented in the museum's Gallery One space.
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Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art / Murat Shrine (Indianapolis)
The students of the graduate seminar Orientalism/Occidentalism, co-taught by Andrew Shelton and Emily Neumeier, ventured to Indianapolis to discover how threads of Orientalism found unique expression in the United States. Their first stop was the Murat Shrine (b.1909) — a former Shriners temple — built in the style of a medieval Egyptian mosque complex and located in the heart of downtown Indianapolis. Students had the opportunity not only to tour the interior but also to examine the architect's blueprints from the building's archive. The group spent the rest of the day at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, to investigate to what extent artists translated themes of Orientalist painting to their depictions of American Indians. The students met with one of the museum's curators to discuss how different themes addressed in the course — especially exoticism and the dynamics of power in art — could be introduced in the planned reinstallation of the museum galleries.
