Department ofArt History

Penn State Art History students, faculty, and staff are involved in a broad range of research initiatives. We invite you to explore.

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Featured Research

Fabrication: Virtual and Material Approaches to Global Textiles

CVMS will focus attention to fibers and fabrics–materials with which most art historians are unfamiliar despite their substantial impact on the arts. The art historical significance of textiles cannot be overstated. Culturally significant ornament and imagery have been woven and sewn since antiquity. Textiles of linen and silk have provided the support for global painting practices for centuries. Patterning of the most delicate and sophisticated variety has appeared in lace and embroidery as much as in sculpture and architecture. Some of the most urgent economic and humanitarian issues of the modern era–the global transit of materials along trajectories of colonial power, the enslavement or exploitation of workers, the gendering and racialization of labor, the swelling of consumer culture–have been most impactful in the context of textile production. https://arts.psu.edu/research/virtual-material-studies/ 

Amara Solari Featured in Research | Penn State Fall 2022

Amara Solari and colleagues have scoured the Yucatán peninsula to document and preserve religious murals painted by Maya Christian artists more than 400 years ago, pairing art history with cutting-edge materials science to gain important new insights about these fragile artworks.

Worlds Collide 

“Yucatán architecture and its associated artworks have remained like a time capsule of the 16th century.”

— Amara Solari