Much of the knowledge and information produced in the 21st century is communicated through images. Studying art history provides students with the skills to critically analyze and comprehend the visual arguments conveyed in these images. Art history also provides students with the tools necessary to communicate this understanding in coherent written and verbal forms.

Studying art history allows students to engage with the ways in which people in the past and present--patrons, artists, users and viewers--have created and employed images and to what ends. Indeed, students of art history study works of art that embody the most important ideas and cherished aspirations of cultures through time and across the globe. As a result, they gain a deeper understanding of a global, and multicultural, past and present.

In studying art history students consider how scholars and others have thought about a given work and are asked to find their place in that discussion. In the art history classroom we carefully look at images and analyze them, research the cultures in which they were produced and make arguments about their meanings and impact.