Walk with Wente: Jay Curley
President Susan R. Wente walks and talks with art history professor Jay Curley about how the study of art is at the center of many different disciplines. From how the brain makes meaning of art to sustained looking to visual literacy skills to art analysis, his students learn how art is integrated into the human experience.
More about Jay Curley:
Professor of Art History
Chair of the Art Department
Professor of art history Jay Curley teaches classes on modern and contemporary art. His students explore how art connects to politics, literature and philosophy. Curley is collaborating with colleagues in neuroscience to learn more about what happens to the human brain when confronted with art. He believes art offers a space where people can talk about politics by examining the visual world around us.
He is the author of the award-winning A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2013) and Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King, 2019). His research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Henry Moore Foundation, the Terra Foundation, and Paul Mellon Centre, among others.
Curley teaches classes on Western art, post-Cold War art, global contemporary art, Black art in the U.S. and Great Britain and an introductory course on “slow looking.” He also prepares a small group of students to travel to New York City to purchase works for the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art, the University’s premier collection, numbering nearly 200 artworks by over 100 artists. This program is the first of its kind at a university.
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