All upcoming Courses

Discover how visual art can inspire creative writing and how writing can offer a powerful way to experience art. Join Mary Hall Surface, the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art’s popular Writing Salon, for three online workshops that spotlight a diverse range of visual art chosen to inspire writers of all experience levels to deepen their process and practice. This writing session is inspired by 20th-century African American artist Romare Bearden’s Tomorrow I May Be Far Away.

Our modern world echoes and even replicates the creative vestiges of the past—and the key to understanding our surroundings is through an overview of ancient material culture. Focusing on the Mediterranean region, art historian Renee Gondek offers a survey of the earliest traces of artistic production from the Paleolithic period through the late Bronze Age. (World Art History Certificate core course, 1 credit)

Monet. The name alone conjures up vivid images: water lilies in Giverny, haystacks in the French countryside, trains pulling into Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, the façade of the Rouen cathedral. A pioneer of the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet created paintings capturing nature’s fleeting moments—and rendered the scenes unforgettable. Art historian Joseph P. Cassar leads an in-depth look at one of the most influential and best-loved Impressionist painters. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)

A picture is not only worth a thousand words: It can sometimes inspire a whole invented world. Art historian Heidi Applegate explores the art, artists, and factual backgrounds behind three works of historical fiction­—Rules of Civility by Amor Towles; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; and The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz. It’s a “novel” way to explore the arts. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)

Our modern world echoes and even replicates the creative vestiges of the past—and the key to understanding our surroundings is through an overview of ancient material culture. Focusing on the Mediterranean region, art historian Renee Gondek offers a survey of the earliest traces of artistic production from the Paleolithic period through the late Bronze Age. (World Art History Certificate core course, 1 credit)

Monet. The name alone conjures up vivid images: water lilies in Giverny, haystacks in the French countryside, trains pulling into Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, the façade of the Rouen cathedral. A pioneer of the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet created paintings capturing nature’s fleeting moments—and rendered the scenes unforgettable. Art historian Joseph P. Cassar leads an in-depth look at one of the most influential and best-loved Impressionist painters. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)

Our modern world echoes and even replicates the creative vestiges of the past—and the key to understanding our surroundings is through an overview of ancient material culture. Focusing on the Mediterranean region, art historian Renee Gondek offers a survey of the earliest traces of artistic production from the Paleolithic period through the late Bronze Age. (World Art History Certificate core course, 1 credit)

Monet. The name alone conjures up vivid images: water lilies in Giverny, haystacks in the French countryside, trains pulling into Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, the façade of the Rouen cathedral. A pioneer of the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet created paintings capturing nature’s fleeting moments—and rendered the scenes unforgettable. Art historian Joseph P. Cassar leads an in-depth look at one of the most influential and best-loved Impressionist painters. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)

The more than 40 concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are among the greatest bodies of work that exist in the Western concert music canon. From vivacious early experiments to the magisterial later masterworks, the composer’s sublime invention never dimmed. Pianist and scholar Rachel Franklin explores how Mozart  built the modern concerto form with inexhaustible creativity and shaped our contemporary expectations of virtuosity allied with expressive power.

Our modern world echoes and even replicates the creative vestiges of the past—and the key to understanding our surroundings is through an overview of ancient material culture. Focusing on the Mediterranean region, art historian Renee Gondek offers a survey of the earliest traces of artistic production from the Paleolithic period through the late Bronze Age. (World Art History Certificate core course, 1 credit)