Undergraduate History of Art and Design

By seeing, learning, working, and doing in the panoply of the art world of New York City with the distingished faculty at Pratt, students of art and design converge in an urban center of international stature.

Art is an agent, an active force that forms as well as motivates human behavior.  Artistic/aesthetic expression contains, expands and propels our lives in ways quite distinct from physical, emotional or even intellectual experience.  Design choices, forms and media, modes of expression, and the relations among them are all foundations of art and design.  Their developments, shifts, appearances and disappearances in different cultures at different times is the constellation of human ingenuity, product, belief, and behavior.  That constellation is the skeleton of the history of art and design.

The artist is the impresario of that agency, the ring-master of aesthetic experience.  Who should she be?  Which lion should be the next to roar?  How high is the trapeze? How many clowns are there in the car?  In the past the owner of the circus, the pharaoh, the emperor, the pope, the museum director, or the critic has constrained and even defined those choices.  Who the artist has been? What has been her voice? Who has listened to that melody?  These are patterns and paths that have changed over time, and from which a Pratt student may fashion her own way, each seeing the facts of a shared past and applying the rigor or a critical mind, to carry on the community of the educated.

Art as a force in society, and the artist as the creator of that force, tells a tale that is wide and deep.  The path is broad, and its telling both lush and textured.  The history of art and design at Pratt is that story at its richest; standing at the convergence of art and design in the studio, the gallery and the classroom; exposing the capture and pursuit of aesthetic expression through digital media, painting, print making, performative arts, fashion, and the endless array of expressive forms that exist and are yet to be formulated; charting the voice and posture of the artist across the horizons of time, perception, and cultural context.  These are the wealth of information, interpretation and motivation that art and design history bring to the screen, the table, the bench and the easel at Pratt.

The object, the image, the concept, the act, ART at Pratt is the voice of human expression over time, the history of the aesthetic animal freed from the captivity of predisposition and predictability, loosed on an unsuspecting world, and embodied in the educated arts professional.  Bridging the classroom and the studio in an emergent world that is no longer monolithic and canonic, a new past is upon us and the future is its prey.

Undergraduate Programs
Art History BA
Theory, Criticism, and History of Art, Design and Architecture BFA

History of Art and Design Minor
Art is an agent, an aUndergraduates at Pratt who choose to minor in the History of Art and Design are required to complete at least 18 credits of art and design history, or six beyond the B.F.A. requirement of 12 credits. Prospective minors should see the department chairperson for advisement on appropriate choice of courses.