Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota

07/31/2026

03/13/2026

Please join us for the public portion of Angelica Maier's doctoral dissertation defense at 4:00 PM on April 14 which will be hybrid.

140 Blegen Hall
Zoom registration: z.umn.edu/maierdefense

03/11/2026

The Department of Art History is very sad to announce the loss of Emeritus Professor Gabriel P. Weisberg (Gabe) who died last month. Emeritus Professor Steven F. Ostrow wrote about Gabe's distinguished career as a curator and educator.

Share your own story here: https://forms.gle/B8xY2FKTkzMA1fiC7

Professor Emeritus Steven F. Ostrow writes about Gabriel Weisberg's distinguished career as a curator and educator.

02/06/2026

Professor Jenn Marshall is giving a “Built to Last” Pop-Up Gallery Talk next Friday, February 13 at 11:30am in the Cargill Gallery (103) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art

About the talk:
Why enshrine a factory in a painting? What happens when a camera, a type of machine, takes a picture of another machine? Can we call a dam a landscape?

In this gallery talk, Jennifer Jane Marshall, an art history professor at the University of Minnesota, will guide visitors through the early 20th-century romance with the Machine Age, pausing to consider how it sometimes tilted into the dread of an awful sublime.

Join us for a series of in-gallery conversations with guest speakers who will share different perspectives on the exhibition “Built to Last: The Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art.”

12/10/2025

Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, U of MN professor Karen Mary Davalos is making waves in the art world with "Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection"—an exhibition that pushes back against narrow definitions of what Chicano art can be.

Featuring 50 works that span five decades of LA's Chicanx art scene, Professor Davalos's curatorial approach is revolutionary. By organizing the show into themes like "Anti-Portraiture"—art that intentionally obscures faces to challenge traditional power dynamics—she's creating what she calls "interventions into the record of Chicano art history."

"Civil rights movements were about a redistribution of power," she explained. "Artists decided to push back and create what we call anti-portraiture."

From bronze-tinted mirrors that invite viewers to see themselves differently, to rhinestone-covered sculptures reimagining classical art, each piece in the exhibition demonstrates how Chicanx artists have resisted dominant narratives through creative practice.

"Artists are the people we look to for critique," Professor Davalos says, "but they're also the people we look to for inspiration to get us through dark times." Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota

🖼️ https://magazine.lmu.edu/articles/laband-gallery-spotlights-chicanx-art/