Poggio Colla

Each summer, undergraduate and graduate students are offered the opportunity to participate in Professor Gregory Warden's excavation of an Etruscan settlement in Tuscany. Recent summer work has unearthed amazing new discoveries and artifacts. For more information about this pioneering excavation, click here.

Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas

For the past three years, in early October, the department has sent 10-12 Art History student volunteers to help staff the international “Open House” at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. When Donald Judd started plans for the Chinati Foundation in the late ‘70s, he was not only rethinking the concept of the museum, he was also embarking on two of his most ambitious works of art. It was Judd’s goal to create outdoor works that would blend harmoniously with the surrounding landscape while maintaining the precision of manmade objects. Seen from a distance, they appear embedded into the Marfa grasslands on the high plains of the Chihuahuan desert. This work forms the core of the Chinati Foundation, which also houses works by Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Once their volnteer shifts are up, students spend the weekend attending talks by international artists, critics and curators, attending free concerts, and meeting other students and art professionals from around the world.

Site-specific graduate seminars

This year, Art History will introduce a site-specific seminar in the graduate program. The first one, in fall 2009, will be in Venice. Associate Professor Lisa Pon's class on the “Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture of Early Modern Venice” will conclude the semester with ten days in Venice for on-site study with local Venetian scholars. The class will be in residence at the new Venice Center for International Jewish Studies along with faculty and students from UC Santa Cruz, Wake Forest, and the University of Venice. The site will change each year, and be attached to a particular faculty/seminar; in fall 2010, the location will be Brazil.