What is the best part about teaching the Core Curriculum?

I have to say the students. They are bright, they’re curious, they’re engaged. What’s most interesting is that the overwhelming majority are not coming from a background in art — the number one thing I hear is most students don’t think art history is for them. As a field, it can seem snooty, a little intimidating. Students feel like they don’t have the vocabulary to say the “right” thing about a painting.

But a few weeks in, the energy changes a little bit. As we talk and learn together, students realize they do have visual literacy skills. They’ve been looking and interpreting the world around them their whole lives, so what we’re doing in the course is just refining those instincts. A really exciting moment is their confidence building — when they begin to connect the works from class to their own experiences and perspectives, both personal and academic. They realize that art history is not this inaccessible, ephemeral thing — it’s a field they can participate in.

I also love how long that connection lasts. I get emails years later from students after they’ve gone to institutions like the Noguchi Museum, or the Studio Museum in Harlem, or the Hispanic Society Museum — places they might not have gone to before our class. I frequently get pictures from former students outside the Parthenon, asking, “Do you remember me?”

How do you innovate and/or bring your own spin to Art Hum?

I bring my curatorial experience and also my research on the history of collecting, museum display and canon creation. I do a lot of thinking about how art history is written, and who gets included and who gets left out.

So in my first class of the semester, I tell students we’re going to work on two parallel tracks. First, we will closely look at the works: formal analysis, visual annotations — the nuts and bolts of how to describe a work of art. The second thing I want them to think about is, why we are studying this particular set of works and artists, and how are they being framed for us? I tell them we are going to think critically about the syllabus itself.

What I love about Art Hum is that we’ve been able to think so much more expansively about these questions than when I was an undergraduate almost two decades ago. Now we’re thinking about artists like Luisa Roldán, Sofonisba Anguissola, Clara Peeters; the art history survey I took was so different from what we’re doing today.

I end the class with my own personal addition, a module on Kerry James Marshall. His work really embodies these ideas about who gets to be represented and who gets left out. If my students end the semester questioning the structure of Art Humanities and thinking critically about both the power and the limitations of studying a canon, then I think I’ve done my job.

What are you teaching that feels especially relevant for this year?

I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, specifically about AI and images. I think it’s more important than ever to be visually literate — I want my students to be able to pause and think, ‘Where is this information coming from? How is it formally framed, and composed? What is it not showing me?’

I think visual literacy is such a big part of critical thinking. In Art Hum, students are actually building those skills. I think students come in expecting that we’re just going to learn to talk about who Monet is. But we are actually thinking much more about the larger questions of observing, questioning, interpreting. Asking these questions is really helpful at a time when we’re being bombarded with images and information that is not always accurate or carries its own bias.

What has been your favorite Core Curriculum teaching moment?

My favorite moment repeats itself every year, like Groundhog Day. When I take my students to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for a lot of them, it’s actually their first visit. People are coming from different backgrounds and the museum’s intimidating scale does not make it any easier. When walking through these galleries, you’re flooded with all these different sculptures and paintings, you don’t know where to look.

But after that initial moment of discomfort, I see a shift as students start recognizing works. They’ll be like, ‘Wait, we saw that Bernini in class,’ or ‘We’re in front of a Raphael altarpiece!’ There’s this lightbulb moment where they realize, ‘Oh, I know what I’m looking at. I can talk about this.’ After that reaction, there is another moment that I look forward to: We will be doing the official tour, and someone will slow down. They’ll point out something that’s not on our syllabus and will ask me about it or connect it to something else. Students form their own little groups and go off and look at things together. When they do this, it is really exciting — it’s these moments that the Core is all about, and it’s what I want them to take from this class.