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Company type | Non-profit organization |
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Industry | Education |
Founded | 2005 |
Headquarters | New York City |
Key people |
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Services | Videos and essays on art and cultural history |
Revenue | 980,741 United States dollar (2022) ![]() |
Total assets | 1,743,864 United States dollar (2022) ![]() |
Website | smarthistory |
Smarthistory is a free resource for the study of art history created by art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Smarthistory is an independent not-for-profit organization and the official partner of the Khan Academy for art history. [1] [2] It is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. [3]
Smarthistory started in 2005 [4] as an audio guide series for use at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [5] The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, [6] and as a resource for students taking introductory art history courses at the college level. [7] In addition to its focus on college-level courses in art history, Smarthistory supports the art history Advanced Placement course and examination developed by The College Board. [8] Smarthistory provides essays, videos, photographs, and links to additional resources for all of the art and architecture that make up the AP art history curriculum. [9] [10]
Smarthistory has published more than 880 videos and 2,000 essays on art and cultural history from the Paleolithic era to the 21st century that include the art of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. [11] [12] Smarthistory's essays have been contributed by more than 200 art historians, curators, and archaeologists writing in their areas of focus and are peer-reviewed. [13] [11] Videos are unscripted conversations between experts recorded on location in front of the original work of art or architecture. [14] [15]
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In an article in the Brooklyn New York Daily News, staff writer Elizabeth Lazarowitz quotes Steven Zucker, "Art can be really intimidating for people", said Zucker. "If we can make art feel exciting and interesting and very much relevant to a historical moment...art can have real meaning." Unlike reading about art in a book, "the idea of the audio was to keep a student's eyes on the image", he explained. "It helped students to learn the material a lot better." [16]
Smarthistory won the Webby Award for Education in 2009. [17] The Samuel H. Kress Foundation gave them a $25,000 grant for development in 2008 and a $38,000 partnership development grant with the Portland Art Museum in 2009. [18]
Irises is an oil painting by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. Painted in 1889, the work is a landscape with a cropped composition and is one of several hundred paintings from a series of paintings that van Gogh made at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in the last year before his death in 1890. It has been in the permanent collection of The Getty in Los Angeles, California since 1990.
Mary Ellen Miller is an American art historian and academician specializing in Mesoamerica and the Maya.
The Discobolus by Myron is an ancient Greek sculpture completed at the start of the Classical period in around 460–450 BC that depicts an ancient Greek athlete throwing a discus. Its Greek original in bronze lost, the work is known through numerous Roman copies, both full-scale ones in marble, which is cheaper than bronze, such as the Palombara Discobolus, the first to be recovered, and smaller scaled versions in bronze.
The Chimera of Arezzo is regarded as the best example of ancient Etruscan art. The British art historian David Ekserdjian described the sculpture as "one of the most arresting of all animal sculptures and the supreme masterpiece of Etruscan bronze-casting". Made entirely of bronze and measuring 78.5 cm high with a length of 129 cm, it was found alongside a small collection of other bronze statues in Arezzo, an ancient Etruscan and Roman city in Tuscany. The statue was originally part of a larger sculptural group representing a fight between a chimera and the Greek hero Bellerophon. This sculpture is likely to have been created as a votive offering to the Etruscan god Tinia and is held by the National Archaeological Museum, Florence.
Advanced Placement (AP) Art History is an Advanced Placement art history course and exam offered by the College Board in the United States.
Tiffany Shlain is an American filmmaker, artist, and author. Described by the public radio program On Being as "an internet pioneer", Shlain is the co-founder of the Webby Awards and the founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Svetlana Leontief Alpers is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.
The Beethoven Frieze is a painting by Gustav Klimt on display in the Secession Building, Vienna, Austria.
Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by Sal Khan. Its goal is to create a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short video lessons. Its website also includes supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators. It has produced over 10,000 video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects, including mathematics, sciences, literature, history, and computer science. All resources are available for free to users of the website and application.
Claus or Claux de Werve was a sculptor active at the Burgundian court under Philip the Bold between 1395 and 1439. He was probably born in the Dutch city of Haarlem around 1380.
Death and Life is an oil-on-canvas painting by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. The painting was started in 1908 and completed in 1915. It depicts an allegorical subject in an Art Nouveau (Modern) style. The painting measures 178 by 198 centimeters and is now housed at the Leopold Museum, in Vienna.
The Grands Boulevards is an oil on canvas painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painted in 1875. The painting illustrates a busy Paris boulevard, showing the effects of industrialisation and Haussmannisation. The image is housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is considered Renoir's most famous view of Paris.
Jolene Rickard, born 1956, citizen of the Tuscarora Nation, Turtle clan, is an artist, curator, and visual historian at Cornell University, specializing in Indigenous peoples issues. Rickard co-curated two of the four permanent exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Jenni Sorkin is an American art historian, curator, and educator. She is best known for her writing in art criticism, and for highlighting work by feminist artists and artists working in fiber and associated crafts.
The bushel with ibex motifs, also known as the beaker with ibex motifs, is a prehistoric pottery artifact originating from Susa, an ancient city in the Near East located in modern-day Iran. This piece of art is believed to have been created during the Susa I period, between 4200 and 3500 BCE. The bushel is a large vessel, measuring 28.9 x 16.4 cm, and was used as a funerary item among the first inhabitants of Susa.
Renata Holod is an American art historian, architecture historian and archaeologist, specializing in the Islamic world. She is the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor Emerita in the Humanities in the History of Art Department, and current Curator of the Near East Section, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Holod has taught at University of Penn since 1972, and was a visiting Clark Professor at Williams College in 2002. She has conducted and/or directed archaeological fieldwork in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Morocco, Turkey, Ukraine, and Tunisia.
Carol Armstrong is an American professor, art historian, art critic, and photographer. Armstrong teaches and writes about 19th-century French art, the history of photography, the history and practice of art criticism, feminist theory and women and gender representation in visual culture.
David James Clarke is honorary professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Hong Kong where he taught from 1986 to 2017. He was born in Somerset, England, earned his PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in 1983. As an art historian he specialises in the art of Europe, North America and China from the eighteenth century to the present day. He is also active as a visual artist, particularly as a photographer.
Gülru Necipoğlu is a Turkish American professor of Islamic Art/Architecture. She has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University since 1993, where she started teaching as Assistant Professor in 1987. She received her Harvard Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture (1986), her BA in Art History at Wesleyan, her high school degree in Robert College, Istanbul (1975). She is married to the Ottoman historian and Harvard University professor Cemal Kafadar. Her sister is the historian Nevra Necipoğlu.
Denis Semionov - is a Russian new media artist.