The Department of Art and Art History explores the world through art, design, and visual culture. We pursue creative work in the studio and the gallery, through scholarship and curatorial practice. Our students learn to examine the past and shape the future by engaging the material and visual languages with which humans make meaning.
Learn More About Our Degree Programs
Our disciplines embody Georgetown University’s dedication to creating and communicating knowledge. Art connects a multitude of histories, beliefs, politics, economic systems, and environments across a range of media. Understanding a visually mediated society—from handmade objects to the digital screen—is crucial to to citizenship in the 21st century. In a landscape defined by ever-greater arrays of visual information, the ability to critically discern what we see is more important than ever. In our courses, students develop vital habits of mind by closely engaging objects, making things, and grappling with ideas forged around the world over many centuries.
Learn About our Programs
Each of our programs is known for small class sizes and experiential learning—making in the studio or lab, digging in the archive, parsing works in the classroom, interning at museums, collaborating with our galleries, or curating shows. Students in Art & Art History develop skills needed for a range of creative industries and the critical facility that is the hallmark of humanistic education. Those in our majors, minors, and MA program benefit from sustained mentorship in the related fields of art & design, historical research, critical writing, and museum studies.
Washington’s extraordinary museums are an extension of our classroom—from internships and seminar meetings to independent research and learning from the built environment. Closer to home, our Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery and Lucille M. and Richard F.X. Spagnuolo Gallery bring world-class contemporary art to Georgetown, allowing students to work and learn alongside professionals in the field.
Recent Exhibitions Undergraduate Internships
In the News
At Georgetown’s galleries, student curators uncover the stories of alumni and an understudied artist
At first glance, Georgetown’s two most recent gallery exhibits—which debuted on Jan. 17—could not seem more different. In one corner of the Walsh lobby, a set of black-and-white photos wrap around the Spagnuolo gallery’s small room. Across the hall at the de la Cruz gallery, visitors walk through a series of rooms, each wall dedicated to a new sprawling canvas in bright colors. Though the two galleries operate separately, the stories that each exhibit reveals bring them together. Both exhibits combine art history with people’s history: the de la Cruz exhibit includes a brochure providing historical context about 1960s China in addition to artifacts from the artist’s life, while the Spagnuolo exhibit captured histories of Georgetown students and alumni through photography. Georgetown student curators led both projects.
February 10, 2025
In the News
Concealed to Revealed: Confronting Racist Imagery in Museum Collections
November 13, 2024