Explore the history of art and design in the country’s cultural capital. Join a creative community on our landmarked Brooklyn campus, close to NYC’s premier international private collections, libraries, museums, studios, and galleries.
You will become part of a close-knit, supportive community of artists, designers, and thinkers at Pratt. Study in an artistic environment alongside the next generation of creators. As part of Pratt’s extensive network, you will have the opportunity to learn from leading artists, designers, historians, and theorists.
A Strong Foundation in the Liberal Arts
IXD students Wuke Zhou, Yuki Shimano, and Olivia Turpin at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (photo by Shih Wen Huang)
You will gain a wide perspective in theory, design methods, and artistic expression, spanning media such as art, design, architecture, film, and literature. Understand how the effects of gender, class, politics, and religion intersect with art and culture. Pratt’s liberal arts curriculum, including foreign language study, prepares you to research and critically analyze art and literature.
Immersed in Nature—in the Heart of New York City
Our beautiful, tree-lined campus is a green oasis in Brooklyn, located minutes from world-class museums, galleries, and theaters. Students walk through our rotating sculpture park, landmarked buildings, and lush lawns on the way to class.
A Versatile, Interdisciplinary Degree
Interdisciplinary and socially engaged, our program provides a broad foundation from which students build critical and analytical capacities. Drawing on disciplines ranging from sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and economics, you’ll go beyond aesthetics to consider complex questions and challenges. Our students learn to write and research effectively—invaluable skills in an evolving world.
With class sizes of just 12–20, you’ll collaborate closely with your team, faculty, and community partners to learn the skills needed to create strategies and systems that meet real-world challenges.
Customize Your Degree with Electives and Seminars
Take electives in film and design, architecture, non-Western, pre-Renaissance, Renaissance to Rococo, and 19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century art, design, theory, and methodology. Major-specific seminars are available from your first through senior year on topics that include the role of New York as a cultural capital, critical and theoretical models, and art and social justice.
Mosaic restorer Giovanni Cucco explains his work at SS. Maria e Donato to graduate student Amy Ungricht (photograph by Kate McElhiney)
Internships in the NYC Art World
Pratt has longstanding connections within New York City’s art community. Our dedicated internship coordinator helps students find excellent programs at leading arts institutions in the city, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Met, as well as galleries and auction houses.
Study Abroad in Paris, London, or Venice
Pratt has deep connections with university partners around the world. We offer summer intensives in Pratt in London and in Paris programs. We also recently celebrated the 35th anniversary of Pratt in Venice, a six-week program held each June and July.
The BA program affords a grounding in the philosophy, literature, and criticism of the history of art and design. Students will take specially designed foundation courses and the survey classes. They will continue with additional credits in liberal arts (English, humanities, sciences, social sciences, and foreign language) and electives. Majors will take upper-level electives in film and design, architecture, non-Western, pre-Renaissance, Renaissance to Rococo, and 19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century art, theory and methodology, and chemistry of art. The BA also features major-specific seminars from the first year through the senior year. Seminar topics include the role of New York as a cultural capital, critical and theoretical models, and art and social justice.
Undergraduates have an understanding of their own cultural environments as well as their places within them.
Undergraduates are able to use tools of critical inquiry to explore gender, class, politics, religious practices, conditions and materials of production, aesthetic expression, and the economics of the market within their larger geographic, historical, theoretical, and social contexts.
Undergraduates in the B.A. degree will be familiar with a foreign language after four semesters of study.
Our Faculty
Pratt’s distinguished faculty of outstanding creative professionals and scholars share a common desire to develop each student’s potential and creativity to the fullest. Bringing different views, methods, and perspectives they provide a rigorous educational model in which students make and learn. See all History of Art and Design faculty and administrators.
Career Paths After Graduation: Work and Advanced Study
Our program is your launchpad for success in competitive fields. Graduates pursue thriving careers at leading organizations such as the Christie’s Design Department, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and World Monuments Fund.
They are also uniquely prepared for advanced research and study, earning placements in prestigious graduate programs such as Harvard University, the University of Southern California, the University of Edinburgh, Oxford University, and the Victoria and Albert/Royal College of Art master’s programs.
Career Support for Life
Students and alumni can schedule one-on-one appointments with career strategists in Pratt’s Center for Career and Professional Development. A career strategist can work with you to develop your job/internship search strategies and life and business plans, as well as review résumés, cover letters, websites, and other marketing materials.
You are invited to an HAD Faculty Conversations by Alex Todd, “‘All this repeats”: Wild Plakken and the neo-avant-garde.”
* This event is for Pratt community only.
Date: Thursday, February 26th
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Venue: Main 210
About the Project: When describing its practice in 1979, the Dutch graphic design collective Wild Plakken (1977–1996) made a claim to situate itself within a historical lineage of political, avant-garde graphic design in the Netherlands. Outlining the visual and political context in which it was working, the collective referenced its own connection to the “progressive ideas” of the 1920s and 30s, and suggested that the themes of the inter-war period could be seen to be repeating in the 1970s and 1980s. Taking this claim as a starting point, this talk will examine the ways in which Wild Plakken’s practice can be understood in relation to notions of the “neo-avant-garde” and — more broadly — as an attempt to recall the spirit of inter-war graphic design in order to reject, or challenge, the visual and political moment of the 1980s Netherlands.
About the Speaker:Dr Alex J. Todd is a design historian and faculty member in the History of Art and Design department at Pratt Institute. Alex Received his MA from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London and his PhD from the History of Art and Design programme at the University of Brighton, where his dissertation focused on the political practice of the Dutch graphic design collective Wild Plakken. Alex is also the Student Officer for the Design History Society and co-lead of the Design Activism strand of the Centre for Design History.
The History of Art and Design Department is pleased to announce the following study abroad opportunities for Summer 2026:
Pratt in London: Museums on Site (3 credits, Prof. Sarah Lichtman) / 2 weeks June 1-12th.
Pratt in Paris: Art on Site (3 credits, Prof. Karyn Zieve) / 3 weeks
June 29-July 21st.
Pratt in Paris: Design on Site (3 credits, Prof. Anca Lasc) / 3 weeks
June 29-July 21st.
Info session: February 3, 2026 @ 5pm on Zoom
For more information and to apply, please find our programs on Terra Dotta:
https://pratt-sa.terradotta.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Abroad.Home
Welcome to a new semester of creativity, growth, and discovery. Even as the blizzard blankets the world outside, we’re excited to see the inspiring work our community will bring to life this year.
Sarah Lichtman will be speaking on the panel “Structures of Success: Women Leading in Architecture and Design” at The Winter Show on January 31, 3:00–4:00 PM.
Click the link in the bio for more HAD Faculty News.
#ArtHistory #art #historyofart #ArtAndDesign #pratthad #pratt #historyofdesign
You are invited to “A Brief Tour Through Drag History,” by Jacob Bloomfield.
* This event is for Pratt community only.
Date: Tuesday, February 3rd
Time: 5:30-7:00 pm
Venue: Alumni Reading Room
About the Project: In this talk, Dr Jacob Bloomfield (author of Drag: A British History) provides a survey of the history of drag performance. Seasoned drag scholars will discover new faces, places, and anecdotes in drag history while newcomers will get acquainted with the basics, including styles of drag, major flashpoints in the art form’s history, and the very origins of the term ‘drag’. Throughout, Bloomfield demonstrates that drag’s popularity long predates RuPaul’s Drag Race. Historically, drag performers have been some of the most renowned artists of their day, prominent throughout the media landscape in theatre, visual arts, early film, early television, and even early gramophone record and radio. This was despite — and in some cases due to — the controversy the art form sometimes aroused.
About the Speaker: Jacob Bloomfield is a Zukunftskolleg Associated Fellow at the University of Konstanz and an Honorary Researcher at the University of Kent. Jacob is the author of Drag: A British History (University of California Press, 2023). His latest article, ‘“Little Richard: Down, Not Out”: The Quasar of Rock’s LGBTQ Iconicity and the Historical Reception to His Sexuality and Gender Presentation, 1955-Present’, appears in the January 2026 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
#art #pratthad #ArtHistory #pratt #historyofart #ArtAndDesign #historyofdesign
You are invited to "Otl Aicher’s Designs for Development," by Eric Anderson.
Date: Thursday, November 20th
Time: 5:45pm
Venue: Alumni Reading Room
About the Project: As a founder of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm and creator of graphic identities for Lufthansa and the Munich Olympics, Otl Aicher has been celebrated for his role in establishing modern design as a pillar of post-Nazi West German culture. This talk examines a different and little-known facet of Aicher’s career, his contribution to the globally emergent field of design for development. Traveling to India in 1960, Aicher made design proposals to support economic and social programs in the newly independent nation. Examining Aicher’s unpublished travel reports, held today in the HfG Archives, the talk considers the designer’s work in India in relation to the Ulm School’s influential systems-design method, Third World politics, and postcolonial debates on development.
About the Speaker: Eric Anderson is Professor and Chair of the Theory and History of Art and Design department at Rhode Island School of Design. A historian of modern design, his research interests include interiors and domesticity, exhibitions and media, the cultural history of Vienna and psychoanalysis, and the global history of modernism. He recently completed a manuscript titled The Chromatic Unconscious, on Sigmund Freud and Viennese design before 1900, and is currently beginning a new project, Ulm in the World, on the West German school’s transnational networks, development pedagogy, and geopolitical engagements in the 1960s.
You are invited to an HAD Faculty Conversations by Philip Ording, “Anni Albers’s Trigonometry”
* This event is for the Pratt community.
Date: Thursday, November 20th
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Venue: Main 210
About the Project: Anni Albers (1899-1994) is perhaps most widely known as a textile artist but she was also an accomplished printmaker. This talk will present ongoing research into the geometric character of Albers’s graphic work, with a focus on trigonal designs. These works—etchings, screen prints, and photo-offsets—display intricacies that approach symmetry while skirting it. Our aim is to explore this effect in different contexts that hopefully shed light on how it is achieved. This is joint work with Brenda Danilowitz.
About the Speaker: Philip Ording is a mathematician and writer whose work explores the intersections of mathematics, art, and language. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Math & Science and a Center K-12 Instructor.
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