If you are interested in contemporary and visual culture and you want to explore how and why visual images and objects have been created and how they have been interpreted and understood then a graduate art history course might be for you. Art history programs at graduate level attract students from a wide variety of academic backgrounds but they are united in their motivated and questioning approach. A keen interest in exploring the wider context of the visual arts and critical and methodological debates in art history provide a good grounding for studying art history a graduate level. In your graduate program you can expect to engage with a range of modern and contemporary paintings, objects, installation, photography, film, and new media. Why not study art in context and apply for a graduate art history course?

Drawing on the diversity of histories, theories, methods, and practices of art history, it is possible to look at aspects of art and visual culture from a more global context. Studying a graduate art history course gives you the opportunity to carry out research into specific aspects and examples of art. These areas of interest are hugely diverse but a few examples include: art theory and historiography; identity and cultural difference; theories of subjectivity, modernism and postmodernism; gender, sexuality, race, and class; popular culture; cinema; interior decoration; city cultures; typography, graphics; media and mass communication; and curating. As you can see, art history as an academic discipline allows you to draw on many other disciplines, skills and interests.

Graduate art history programs may be offered with an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach to the critical histories, theories, methods, and practices of art history. Studying a graduate art history course will enable you to become familiar with museums, galleries and auction houses both in your host country and abroad. It is important that students develop a personal approach to the analysis of their own areas of interest and expertise. Graduate programs may be full or part-time and are often taught on a modular basis with a dissertation on a chosen topic.

What you will learn throughout your graduate art history course are the critical and methodological ways of examining art history. The emphasis then being placed upon ways in which to examine, investigate, interrogate, assess and consider a number of issues: from modernism to nation, race and class, and from patronage to gender and sexuality.

Upon completion of your graduate program in art history, a number of career options are open to you. As an Art history graduate, you have a high standard of education, including good communication skills, critical, creative, and analytic skills, and other transferable skills – all highly valued by employers. Areas of employment that art history graduates commonly go into include:

• The media
• Creative and cultural industries
• Museum and gallery work
• Magazine and book publishing
• Tourist and leisure industries
• Film and television companies
• Curating
• Archives and libraries
• Advertising and creative consulting

To gain admission to a graduate art history course you will need to check the specific admission requirements as these tend to vary from one university or college to the next. However, broadly speaking, it is expected that students entering an art history program at graduate level will have a good first degree in an area such as Art History, Fine Art Practice, English, Humanities, Design Studies, Philosophy, Performance, Film and Media Studies, Women’s Studies, and Sociology. Good luck with your application to an art history course, it will be the start to a long and interesting career.