Visual intelligence is crucial in navigating the world of images conveying coded messages and ideas' history. How do we read such images? Art History provides the skills to decode and analyse how experts move the eye around artworks, photographs, advertisements, digital images, buildings, and monuments—and in different historical periods. Students learn how to identify and discuss the visual styles of many cultural traditions around the world and to connect deeply with Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Pacific.
Art invites us to experience culture and history through the senses, producing empathy, passion, and contemplation. It trains students to recognise how power in social media, news and entertainment manipulates vision and shows how artists have challenged this power. Art sharpens our perceptions and therefore strengthens our abilities to think independently.
Art History examines the many roles the visual arts have played in different cultures and in different periods – aesthetic, social, religious, political and commercial. You can explore not only painting, drawing and sculpture, but also architecture, photography, video, performance art, design and the graphic and decorative arts.
Our lectures are visually stimulating, including a variety of beautiful, puzzling and sometimes controversial images. As an Art History student you can have the opportunity to study famous artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Marina Abramovic, Olafur Eliasson, Lisa Reihana, Simon Denny, and many others.
You can explore Renaissance and Baroque periods, Māori and Pacific art, curatorial and museum studies, contemporary art and theory, cross-cultural representation, photography and digital culture.