Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota

03/13/2026

Please join us for the public portion of Angelica Maier's doctoral dissertation defense at 4:00 PM on April 14 which will be hybrid.

140 Blegen Hall
Zoom registration: z.umn.edu/maierdefense

03/11/2026

The Department of Art History is very sad to announce the loss of Emeritus Professor Gabriel P. Weisberg (Gabe) who died last month. Emeritus Professor Steven F. Ostrow wrote about Gabe's distinguished career as a curator and educator.

Share your own story here: https://forms.gle/B8xY2FKTkzMA1fiC7

Professor Emeritus Steven F. Ostrow writes about Gabriel Weisberg's distinguished career as a curator and educator.

02/06/2026

Professor Jenn Marshall is giving a “Built to Last” Pop-Up Gallery Talk next Friday, February 13 at 11:30am in the Cargill Gallery (103) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art

About the talk:
Why enshrine a factory in a painting? What happens when a camera, a type of machine, takes a picture of another machine? Can we call a dam a landscape?

In this gallery talk, Jennifer Jane Marshall, an art history professor at the University of Minnesota, will guide visitors through the early 20th-century romance with the Machine Age, pausing to consider how it sometimes tilted into the dread of an awful sublime.

Join us for a series of in-gallery conversations with guest speakers who will share different perspectives on the exhibition “Built to Last: The Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art.”

12/10/2025

Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, U of MN professor Karen Mary Davalos is making waves in the art world with "Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection"—an exhibition that pushes back against narrow definitions of what Chicano art can be.

Featuring 50 works that span five decades of LA's Chicanx art scene, Professor Davalos's curatorial approach is revolutionary. By organizing the show into themes like "Anti-Portraiture"—art that intentionally obscures faces to challenge traditional power dynamics—she's creating what she calls "interventions into the record of Chicano art history."

"Civil rights movements were about a redistribution of power," she explained. "Artists decided to push back and create what we call anti-portraiture."

From bronze-tinted mirrors that invite viewers to see themselves differently, to rhinestone-covered sculptures reimagining classical art, each piece in the exhibition demonstrates how Chicanx artists have resisted dominant narratives through creative practice.

"Artists are the people we look to for critique," Professor Davalos says, "but they're also the people we look to for inspiration to get us through dark times." Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota

🖼️ https://magazine.lmu.edu/articles/laband-gallery-spotlights-chicanx-art/

11/12/2025

Archivist and art history PhD student Caleb Allen interns with the Bell Library to curate an exhibit of 500-year-old artifacts, combining experience with interest.

Archivist and art history student Caleb Allen (ARTH) interns with the Bell Library to curate an exhibit of 500-year-old artifacts, combining experience with interest.

11/04/2025

Everybody loves a good museum heist. Not because people want to see precious objects snatched from some of the world’s most infamous institutions, but rather because of the fascination and...

11/04/2025

Check out our spring 2026 courses!

We are pleased to offer a variety of art history courses this spring.

10/09/2025

The MAHS 2026 Annual Conference will be held in Minneapolis, March 19-21. Visit the MAHS website to download the Call for Papers. Deadline to submit abstracts is November 7, 2025. Click here: https://www.mahsonline.org/conference/

10/06/2025

Happy World Teachers' Day (10/5/25)! Check out this video about Professor Jane Blocker's award-winning teaching methods.

This is "Jane Blocker (ARTH) 2025 Motley Teaching Award" by UMN College of Liberal Arts on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love…

09/11/2025

Please join us for a lecture by Dr. Julia Bryan-Wilson (Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University) on curating q***r histories.

Oct. 2, 11am
1210 Heller Hall

Please join us for a lecture by Dr. Julia Bryan-Wilson (Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University) on curating q***r histories.

08/25/2025

ARTH 1007 - Introduction to Museum Studies w/ Prof. Jenn Marshall.