Dear Art History community,
Something remarkable is happening in the Department of Art History. At a time when academic disciplines face pressure to justify their relevance, more and more students are choosing to study ancient architecture, Renaissance paintings and artistic traditions from across the world.
A conversation this September revealed what’s on our students’ minds. The Department was pleased to welcome Laurence des Cars, President-Director of the Louvre Museum, who delivered a lecture about the urgent need to modernize the Louvre’s infrastructure to meet twenty-first-century challenges. She also spent several hours in conversation with students and faculty members as part of our University of Toronto–France Art History Partnership. We peppered her with thoughtful questions about keeping the Louvre relevant for younger audiences, finding forgotten masterpieces, and navigating careers between academia and museums.
Des Cars was candid about the challenges. She described how curators need “a very strong academic backbone”: that is, a foundation of deep knowledge in a field they genuinely care about. She warned against oversimplifying for mass audiences, calling on museums to bring “complexity to the world” and help visitors encounter the strange and surprising. These principles struck me as exactly what we aim to cultivate in our students: substantive knowledge of works, artists, and traditions, and an ability to see and communicate nuance.
In this newsletter, you’ll read more about Des Cars’s visit, and about our celebrated Brieger Memorial Lecture Series, now entering its fifth decade. You’ll also read about Professor Christy Anderson’s tenure as editor-in-chief of the renowned Art Bulletin, and alumna Stefanie Yu Molina’s career journey to leading immersive technology projects in Silicon Valley. Visual literacy, independent judgment, and comfort with ambiguity: these are the capacities our graduates carry with them, whether they end up at Meta or the Met.
Thank you for being part of our community.
Sincerely,
Joseph L. Clarke
Chair, Department of Art History