Art History

Art History offers interdisciplinary approaches, a global outlook, and an interest in ethnic and gender diversity.  Pomona cooperates with Scripps College in this program, which offers courses in the history of African, Asian, European, and North American art.  Recent course titles include: Women, Art, and Ideology; History of Cities; East and West; Social History of North American Art; Issues in African American Art; and Monuments of Asia.

Specialties of art history faculty include architecture and fresco painting in Italy; the art of Africa and of artists of African descent in the Americas; the history of cities and gardens; issues of gender and the body in Early Modern art; and the social history of North American art, including Native American traditions, from the 16th Century to the present.

The Department of Art and Art History at Pomona has had numerous notable graduates.  Among them, graduate James Turrell '65 received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 1984, one of the first two visual artists ever to win the prestigious prize.  Sculptor Peter Shelton '71 had a retrospective of his sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Other graduates have included the director of cultural affairs for the City of San Francisco and the chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.