Overview

The Art History and Visual Culture program is offered at Rhodes University.

Key facts

Art History & Visual Culture courses introduce students to a diverse range of visual images and objects. However, the primary objective of Art History & Visual Culture is to expose students to the theories and research methods of art history. Students will be expected to participate in a variety of exercises designed to help cultivate these research skills. More importantly, the course pays special attention to improving students reading and writing skills through written essays which the Art History & Visual Culture section has adopted as its principle student assessment method.

Although the focus of the course is history of art, both Western and African, a number of art historical discourses emerging from the Global South and African Diaspora are looked at. The course is also structured in terms of themes, conceptual areas and cultural practices rather than in terms of a traditional historical approach in which students study the history of art as a sequence of periods and styles. In placing the emphasis on thematic modules, the intention is to equip students with critical and conceptual skills that would enable them to research selected areas of art history and visual culture independently.

Art History & Visual Culture courses are offered by the Department of Fine Art to students studying Fine Art Practice as well as those who are not. For those studying Fine Art Practice as a major, Art History & Visual Culture is necessarily the second major in the degree (see Programmes). Students not studying Fine Art Practice may take Art History & Visual Culture as a credit for a year or two, and have the option of taking the course as a major.

There are numerous career opportunities for graduates of Art History & Visual Culture. Art History & Visual Culture also combines well with other subjects offered in the Humanities Faculty. An understanding of the relationship between representation and society can be inestimably useful for students of disciplines such as Journalism, Philosophy, History, Political Studies, Sociology, Psychology, Drama, English Language and Linguistics, English and other languages. Fine Art Practice students, meanwhile, will find in the Art History & Visual Culture courses various concepts, themes, contentions, arguments, discourses and sites for intervention, which they might want to explore at a personal level in their practical work.