We asked colleagues, what do you study and why?
Special thanks to Susana Sosa, Rachel Barron-Duncan, Derek Burdette, Kim Richter, and Rachel Miller whose voices and insights are featured here.
This video was made possible thanks to the Macaulay Family Foundation
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] Why is it important to study art of the past?
Rachel Bower: [0:07] Art history is not just in the past, it is in the present. When I teach art history, I’m teaching about the context. I’m trying to help my students find those connections between what happened then and why, what’s happening now and why.
Nicole Gherry: [0:21] Everything that we have about where we came from, our culture, the ideas that we’ve had in the past, are all wrapped up in these artifacts and the arts that we look at. If we want to know more about who we are today, we should really look at past arts.
Livia Alexander: [0:36] I believe that art is the underlying thread that informs everyday life in ways that we might not even be aware of. I think it is a language that is important for us to understand how it works and how we read it. Virtual literacy is just as important as written literacy. We’re living in a visual world.
Derek Burdette: [0:58] Studying art history helps us find points of connection with people from other places and other times.
Rachel Miller: [1:04] One of the things that I think my students get out of studying art of the past is that they can start to empathize and understand what it was like to live a life that is very different from their own. They understand that their cultural frame of reference and their religious frame of reference is not the norm throughout all time and space.
Kim Richter: [1:23] I’m a non-Westerner, so I firmly believe that it’s important to study the traditions of other cultures and not just privilege the legacy of European art, but understand also that other cultures produce important art and some of the best artists.
Rachel Barron-Duncan: [1:39] I think we study the art of the past because we are fascinated about ourselves and our own creative potential, and also really fascinated about our own deeper sense of where we come from.
[1:50] Art is this record that the past has left us that allows us to look back in time and understand what they cared about, what they really thought was precious, what they thought was worth recording and leaving for the future generations. We understand ourselves and who we are as human by understanding the art of the past.
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