This essay will discuss the need for the humanities to address visual culture studies as part of its interdisciplinary mission in today's university. Although mostly unnoticed in recent debates in the humanities over historical and theoretical frameworks, the relatively new field of visual culture has emerged as a corrective to a growing…

Job security is a relatively new concept in the ancient field of teaching art. Historically artists have created, and been judged on, their own credentials--that is, their art. The master of fine-arts (M.F.A.) degree, often described as a "terminal degree," or the endpoint in an artist's formal education, has long been sufficient for artists…

While artists and academics have produced a wide range of work trying to understand national and individual identity, very little has been written about the experiences of student artists as they work to make sense of their particular political, social, and artistic identities and put them to work in the world. This article takes up that question,…

Last year these authors addressed an issue in these pages that echoed Linda Nochlin 's (1971) haunting question, "Why have there been no great women artists?" (Clark, Folgo, & Pichette, 2005). That essay examined the question, "Have there now been any great women artists?" through a study of art history textbooks primarily written for college…

Artemis is a late Hellenistic Greek marble sculpture of the huntress, running in a flowing garment, now lacking arms, legs, and head, and about three-quarters life-sized. The llama is a remarkable hollow male figure of smooth thin gold, and about two inches tall, and was made by the Inca before the Spanish conquest in 1532. This narrative is just…

Many aspects of the current cultural situation bode well for undergraduate art education. Today's college students have had more experience of the visual arts, at least in their vernacular forms, than any generation in history. They have watched thousands of hours of television, watched hundreds of feature films, and often have mastered computer…