Department of Art History
Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies (CHAPS)
Prospective Students
Janki Patel
Janki Patel says that majoring in art history was a wonderful way to learn about life, understand the human experience, and gather the skills to navigate the contemporary world. "I learned an analytical approach that I can now carry over to any situation,” she said. “I can break down something to its basic values, whether it’s a piece of art, a social situation, or a workplace issue.
All it took was a single, 100-level course for Janki Patel to decide on a major and begin seriously contemplating her calling in life.
Patel was a first-year student at Rutgers University–New Brunswick when she decided to sign up for “Introduction to Western Art History.”
“I was exploring possibilities,” the SAS’18 graduate says. “I took this course and everything fell into place.”
It wasn’t solely the content—a survey of major art movements through 1400—that inspired Patel. It was the intelligence, verve, and historical sweep that faculty members John Kenfield and Mieke Paulsen Bahmer brought to the classroom, covering everything from ancient Mesopotamia and Persia to European Gothic.
“They presented it with such authority, knowledge, and grasp,” Patel says. “I wanted to fashion myself in the same way.”
I can break down something to its basic values, whether it’s a piece of art, a social situation, or a workplace issue. Art history gives you the tools to interpret your surroundings.
She went on to major in art history and German, crafting an expansive and adventurous undergraduate experience. She did two Study Abroad stints, took an array of compelling courses, and found a community of like-minded students in the Rutgers Art History Student Association.
She graduated feeling poised, confident, and skilled. She also has a full time job at the Pratt Institute.
“As an art history major I had to develop an analytical approach that I can now carry over to any situation,” she said. “I can break down something to its basic values, whether it’s a piece of art, a social situation, or a workplace issue.
“Art history gives you the tools to interpret your surroundings.”
Growing up in both India and New Jersey, Patel always enjoyed art and did her own painting and sketching.
“I had training as an artist,” she says. “But I was more inspired by what artists had previously done. That is what I wanted to study.”
As an art history student, her academic palette was broad. She learned about fields such as architecture and typography, studied the work of seminal figures like the Russian avant-garde artist known as El Lissitzky, and pursued intellectually challenging themes such as the intersection of art and technology.
In the summer following her sophomore year, Patel traveled to Europe for a Study Abroad program under Jewish Studies professor Nancy Sinkoff that examined Jewish life in Poland, including in the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos during the Holocaust. The following year Patel took an intensive German program at the Free University in Berlin.
She often found that one educational experience would open up a door to another.
Traveling in Europe, for example, she found herself deeply moved by a visit to the famed Maison D’Verre (House of Glass) in Paris, an architectural marvel built with steel, glass, and glass block.
“When I went to see that house, I fell in love with architectural history,” she said.
Upon returning to Rutgers, she signed up for an interdisciplinary class that included a unit on the Maison D’Verre and an opportunity to write a research paper on the subject. But the course taught by Anette Freytag, titled “Gesamtkunstwerk—Total Work of Art: When Life and Art, House and Garden Become One,” opened up new possibilities.
“Gesamtkunstwerk is a utopian concept to transcend the daily life of people and make them better human beings through art and high quality craftsmanship,” Freytag explains in the syllabus.
Students studied the music of Richard Wagner, the landscape architecture of James Rose, the itinerant ballet company, Ballets Russes, and visited the Metropolitan Opera and Neue Galerie.
“We would go see Madame Butterfly and Parzival,” Patel says. “It was this amazingly enriching concept in which music, art, and life become one.”
Meanwhile, Patel’s involvement in the Rutgers Art History Student Association provided a vital opportunity to unpack all of these experiences among friends and colleagues.
“It’s all these art nerds coming together,” she quips. “But it’s incredibly important, because as art history students we crave context. We want to talk about the exhibition we’ve seen, or the performance we watched or the book we read.”
Shortly after graduating, Patel landed a job as a program assistant for education abroad at the Pratt Institute, a private university in Brooklyn known for its highly-ranked programs in architecture, interior design, and industrial design.
In her spare time she is conducting her own study of architecture in the Hudson Valley and planning for eventual entry into graduate school. Although she hasn’t decided on a single career path, she notes that there is wide range of possibilities for art history students, from archiving to data management to museum and libraries to preservation. Some of her classmates are going to law school to pursue art and culture law.
“My undergraduate years taught me many things,” she says. “And one of the most important is to seek out and find what I am passionate about, and stick to it.”
Tiarra Brown
Tiarra Brown (BA, December 2017) will begin the Art History and Archaeology Masters Program at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in Fall 2020. She previously worked for the CFO of The Marketing Directors, Inc. The Marketing Directors, Inc. is a real estate development and property marketing/sales force that works on behalf of owners and builders of new homes. Tiarra was a History and Art History double major. Her talent for communication, her research skills, and her meticulous record-keeping are an advantage in her real estate work. Being conversant with topics in urban planning also helps, too. She learned a great deal in two of Professor Yanni’s classes, “Introduction to Architecture” and “Cinema and the City.”
Diego Atehortúa
Diego Atehortúa, an art history major in the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers-New Brunswick, is the first Rutgers student to win a Beinecke Scholarship, and one of only 20 students in the United States to receive one in 2017.
Diego Atehortúa’s dream is to earn his Ph.D. in Latin American art.
Diego Atehortúa is fluent in two languages, but he studies art history because he knows there are ideas and emotions that can’t be adequately conveyed in a spoken or written tongue.
“I think art has the power of making sense of this complex and contradictory world we live in,” says Atehortúa, an art history major at Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s School of Arts and Sciences. “It makes things visual and more tangible. And it doesn’t have to be permanent; it can be as ephemeral as a performance.”
Atehortúa, a junior born in Colombia and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, is the first Rutgers student to win a Beinecke Scholarship, and one of only 20 students in the United States to receive one in 2017.
The Beinecke scholarship is a program of the Sperry Fund and provides substantial scholarships for the graduate education of young men and women of exceptional promise. Each scholar receives $4,000 immediately prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school.
I think art makes sense of the things we have difficulty finding language for
“This is a real milestone for Rutgers,” says Arthur D. Casciato, director of the Office of Distinguished Fellowships. “The Beinecke is the most thoroughly academic of the major national fellowships. It’s totally committed to people going on to graduate education. Diego impressed me as someone who would be a first-rate graduate student and scholar.”
Indeed, Atehortúa says, his plan is to become an academic art historian. He already knows where he wants to go – Duke University. He’s particularly drawn to the work of Walter Mignolo, the Argentine social critic and exponent of “decolonial aesthetics,” who is a professor at Duke.
Atehortúa wants to study art and culture from a non-Eurocentric perspective, and his time at Rutgers has already given him a chance to do that – at the Aresty Research Center, where he did directed research on 20th-century Latin American art; during a summer internship at the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, where he worked in
the curatorial department; and, as an assistant to Tatiana Flores, associate professor of art history, helping Flores put together a major exhibition – Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago – for the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California.
“Professor Flores really took me under her wing,” Atehortua says. “Her congeniality, support, and belief in my potential have helped me see research as my future.”
As Flores tells it, Atehortúa came to her already committed to research as a sophomore. “He came up to me in 2015, when he was taking my class, and said he very much wanted to get a Ph.D. in Latin American art,” she remembers. “That was what he wanted to do with his life. I’ve never met an undergraduate student as research-driven as Diego is.”
Atehortúa has plunged into the deep weeds of academic research, according to Flores. He has transcribed interviews she did for her research – in English and Spanish. He has been important to her upcoming exhibition. “Simply put, Diego is my right-hand man as concerns this exhibition,” Flores wrote in her letter supporting Atehortúa’s nomination for the scholarship.
Having done the hard work of academic research and having confirmed that it’s the life he wants, Atehortúa says he’s excited about his future as an art historian. “I think art makes sense of the things we have difficulty finding language for,” he says.
Laura Leichtman
Laura Leichtman is currently studying architectural design at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, in pursuit of a Master of Architecture degree. She graduated from Rutgers-New Brunswick (May 2016) with a double-major in Art History and Mathematics. She was awarded High Honors for her outstanding thesis on the architectural history of Broadway Theaters. She was the recipient of the 2015 Bzdak Travel Award which offered her the opportunity to do art history research in Milan, Italy. She also designed sets for various stage productions at Rutgers.
After college, Laura worked as an architectural historian with Dixon Advisory. In this role, Laura researched the histories of properties owned by the Dixon Advisory Fund to better understand their unique stories and untold value. Laura was also a major contributor in preparing documents for Landmark Preservation Commission applications. While at Dixon, Laura researched over forty properties across Jersey City, Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Sakina Namazi
Sakina Namazi graduated from Rutgers College in 2009 with a major in Art History and a minor in English. She went onto pursue a Masters of Arts from New York University in Visual Arts Administration. Sakina has interned at notable institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She worked for several years in the Business Intelligence and Client Strategy department at Christie's. She is currently attending an MBA program.
During her time at Rutgers, Sakina was the President of the Art History Student Association (RAHSA), chair of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum Student Advisory Board, and the Features Editor for the Daily Targum. She is an avid runner and has completed two full marathons and nine half marathons.
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