A Column Exploring College
Majors
So You Want to Be an
Art/Art History Major?
by Sarah N. Lynch
For
Stella Zagori, a sophomore at the Parsons School of Design,
art has always been her passion. But although Zagori is well
versed in traditional art forms like painting, drawing and
sculpting, her classes at Parson's have taken her in other
artistic directions.
“I'm kind of a non-traditionalist,” Zagori
said. “I don't use paint or really draw, not that I
can't do those things, but I find that expression to be a
little stale. I prefer using paper and fabric, and cutting
things out or using transparencies, photographs, tissue papers,
glitters or any translucent material.”
For students
at Parsons like Zagori who are working towards their Bachelor
in Fine Arts, or BFA, they must follow an extremely rigorous
curriculum. Starting their freshmen year, students take
required “foundation” courses:
a selection of design classes which include 2D design, 3D
design, drawing, digital design, art history and English
composition. The following year, sophomore students have
yet another set of requirements to fulfill. “At Parson's
the courses are all scheduled already for you,” Zagori
said. “You take the required studios, which for me
are painting, drawing and sculpture every semester. Each
of those is 6 hours long and three credits each...For sophomore
year you kind of have to follow the curriculum, and for sculpture
you have to build things out of different materials. You
have to use clay, make a model out of plaster, learn how
to weld and use metal in some way.”
Junior
and senior year at Parsons, however, the students begin
to explore concentration areas. Because Zagori is interested
in “non-traditional” mixed media,
she has taken to creating art out of old books. Zagori said
she is the only student she knows of who creates 3D art out
of books. The project she is working on right now involves
hardcover books by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield
that she purchased at Strand on 13th and 3rd.
“I re-use old books and compile them into
one and make compartments and sides and windows,” she
said.
But
while some people enjoy creating art themselves, there are
others who are fascinated in learning about the history of
art. Victoria Fedrigotti, an art history major at the School
of General Studies at Columbia University, started out
as a history major. But when she began covering the art
gallery scene in Buenos Aires for the Buenos Aires Herald
one summer, her interests shifted and she changed her
major. Now in her senior year at Columbia, Fedrigotti has
recently completed her senior thesis, which studies two paintings
by Francisco de Goya. “I feel like the course
that made me fall in love with art history was the Methods
and Literature of Art History, which is required of all majors,” Fedrigotti
said. “That was an amazing course. It was multi-departmental,
it covered all time periods and all methodologies.”
Fedrigotti chose to write about Goya in part
because she was born in Spain and has a strong interest in
Latin American and Spanish art. Currently, she is interning
in the Latin American Art Department at Christie's.
“My thesis topic was ‘Goya's Asylums
and the Personal Aesthetics of Insanity,” she said. “I
just looked at the two asylums that Goya painted and came
up with a theory that in order to represent insanity, it
has to be through an intensely personal lens because Goya
encountered madness in several episodes of his life, and
his art was infused with a very biographical aspect.”
Art history majors have to take survey courses
that teach them about art from different time periods, including
Renaissance, modern, non-western, 19th century and medieval.
In addition, they must also take an art studio course.
“It makes a lot of sense [to take a studio
art course] because in order to understand art history, you
have to understand what is involved in the creation of art,
so whether it's drawing or silk screening or print making,
you have to understand what's involved in creating a work
that compliments art history and vice versa,” she said.
While
majoring in art and art history can be fascinating and
extremely satisfying, both Zagori and Fedrigotti said it
might not always open up as many career paths. “It's
either teaching, or being in a museum as a curator, working
at an auction house or a gallery or art journalism,” Fedrigotti
said. “But I enjoy what I'm studying and I'm ready
to apply it any way I can.”#