All upcoming Art & Architecture programs

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 five online workshops that explore essential elements of writing and styles through close looking, word-sketching, and imaginative response to prompts. This writing session is inspired by Welsh artist Gwen John’s A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris.

Explore the art and architecture of the Middle Ages through dazzling early Christian mosaics, sumptuous Carolingian illuminated manuscripts, sculpted Romanesque church facades, and soaring Gothic cathedrals. Art historian Judy Scott Feldman examines the art of the thousand-year period between classical antiquity and the Renaissance and its relationship to a diverse society infused with faith and spirituality. (World Art History Certificate core course, 1 credit)

Begun in 1337, the ground floor of Orsanmichele church in Florence, Italy, was originally a loggia-style market. When it was transformed, the inside was decorated with paintings of saints and the outside with statues by artists such as Donatello, Ghiberti, and Verrocchio. Today, the upper floor of Orsanmichele is a museum where all but one of the original sculptures are on display. Renaissance art expert Rocky Ruggiero highlights this museum and its treasures. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

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 five online workshops that explore essential elements of writing and styles through close looking, word-sketching, and imaginative response to prompts. This writing session is inspired by the mixed media work, Winning, by 20th-century African American artist Emma Amos.

Art superstars Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo didn’t evolve within a vacuum. They descended from centuries of celebrated women artists—as well as those whose names were lost. Art historian Nancy G. Heller traces the history of European and American women artists from the late 16th century to 1950, addressing the socioeconomic, political, and aesthetic significance of their work and placing their lives and art within the context of their male contemporaries. (World Art History Certificate core course, 1 credit)

Food and drink appear in myriad contexts over four centuries of European painting. In the Renaissance, feasting transcended mere sustenance, serving as a significant form of communication and expression. Art historian Elaine Ruffolo delves into images of lavish banquets to explore their menus, ingredients, preparation, dining practices, and table settings, as well as the intricate depiction of food in the period’s art. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Historian Clay Jenkinson has chosen 10 magnificent images to explore how great photographs epitomize a moment or an era, capture an extraordinary event, provide a window into the human condition, or make us ache with appreciation and wonder. Jenkinson tells the backstory of each photograph, covering who took it, when, under what circumstances, what has happened in the aftermath, and what influence the image has had on the world. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Artists use their palette as a vehicle for expressing their creative vision—and behind every great painting there’s a palette that tells its story. Art historian and author Alexandra Loske explores this symbiotic relationship, pairing the palettes of artists including Seurat, Rembrandt, and van Gogh with their masterpieces, revealing a fascinating aspect of the creator behind the canvas. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Home to over a million objects from around the globe, Philadelphia’s Penn Museum bridges the study of archaeology and anthropology. Spend the day immersed in ancient art and culture with art historian Renee Gondek and see Sumerian cuneiform tablets, Buddhist sculptures, Native American regalia, and the monumental Sphinx of Ramses II, plus the Greek gallery, which represents the history and culture of Greece from 3000 to 31 B.C.E. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a dominant influence in visual and decorative arts and architecture in the decades leading up to and after the turn of the 20th century, offering an artistic and philosophical reaction to the florid, overdecorated, and industrialized designs of the high-Victorian era. Art historian Bonita Billman explores the rich flowering of the movement in Britian and America, as well as its enduring legacy. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)