This Is Not An Art Exhibition:

2024 Art History Capstone Exhibition

The capstone seminar is the culminating requirement for undergraduate majors in Art History at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. It supplements the comprehensive historical content learned in other courses with a focused look at the origins of art historical methods and the current critical debates that animate our field. Each spring, members of the Capstone develop original research projects on topics of their choosing.  

The 2024 class felt keenly aware of their responsibility as a rising generation of art historians to learn from the past while redefining the field they inherited. Their projects stretch the bounds of art historical convention by promoting a more inclusive vision of art’s history, recentering overlooked artists, and developing fresh interdisciplinary approaches to global art that bridge cultures, geography, and time. 

This online exhibition showcases this year’s thesis work along with the rich diversity of Tyler Art History students’ interests, demonstrating that in addition to enriching the future of art history, our creative, forward-thinking department has MORE FUN.  

Among the topics covered are: a comparative study of genre paintings in 18th-century France and Korea by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Sin Yoon-Bok 신윤복; the Ottonian bronze doors of Bernward of Hildesheim; a global survey of gold’s enduring allure; postwar Hiroshima panels created by Maruki Iri 丸木位里and Maruki Toshi 丸木俊; public art’s significant place in the Philadelphia cityscape; murals and the Mexican Revolution; evolving representations of Blackness in art and museum spaces; the paradoxical pursuit of permanence in environmental art; rococo style in the Rose of Versailles Japanese manga series; collective artistic action and AIDS activism; and innovative perspectives on the lives and artwork of Gustave Caillebotte, Vincent van Gogh, Alice Neel, Eva Hesse, and Juan de Pareja.