Welcome
Welcome to History of Art and Visual Culture, or “HAVC.” Housed in UC Santa Cruz’s dynamic Porter College, we are one of the world’s most conceptually and geographically diverse programs for the study of art and visual culture. We interpret images and objects within historical and social contexts, deepening our understanding of human societies and cultural traditions. We explore the production, use, form, and reception of visual products and cultural manifestations past and present. This work incorporates painting, sculpture, and architecture traditionally defined as art history and extends throughout the field of visual imagery beyond the conventional boundaries formerly drawn by the academy.
Our undergraduate program offers courses covering a wide variety of representations from the cultures of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific Islands including areas as diverse as ritual, performative expression, bodily adornment, landscape, the built environment, installation art, textiles, manuscripts, photography, film, video games, apps, and data visualizations. We also offer a popular concentration in Curation, Heritage, and Museums, and our students regularly explore and intern at museums and galleries across Santa Cruz County and the Bay Area.
Our interdisciplinary graduate program in Visual Studies provides students with exceptional opportunities to consider the roles of social, political, and cultural forces in both shaping and being shaped by assorted modes of visual experience and their relations as well to complex workings of multisensory perception. Areas of particular concern, both historical and current, include spatial and visual theories, environmental, social, and racial justice, colonial and decolonial visual culture, Anthropocene and Indigenous studies. Graduates of our Ph.D. program earn significant support for their research, going on to teach and curate in a variety of academic and museum institutions.
HAVC is staffed by award-winning faculty who research visual cultures from around the globe including Africa, the Indigenous Americas, Asia, Europe, the Mediterranean, the Pacific Islands, and North America. Faculty research, both historical and contemporary, includes such wide-ranging subjects as Technocultural Approaches to Visual Culture, Digital Art and Culture, Art and Ecology, Latin American and Latino Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Modern and Contemporary Architecture and Design, the Art and Visual Culture of Colonialism, and Art in a Global Context.
Come find us near the koi pond!
