Lorraine Affourtit is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Affiliate Faculty in the Gender, Women’s Studies, and Sexuality Studies program at Appalachian State University.

Globalizing and Decolonizing Art History Surveys 

Art history survey courses, often offered in two parts spanning ancient to contemporary art, are the backbone of almost any college-level program in art history at higher education institutions in the United States. Like most art historical doctrine and pedagogy, these courses are rooted in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century European Enlightenment ideologies, universalism, colonial collecting norms, and nation-building values. Twenty-first-century art history programs are increasingly making efforts to globalize and decolonize their survey courses, transforming the focus to visual and material culture as sites of power, identity, and world-making, all from a global perspective.  

To “decolonize” an art history survey is to make visible and accountable the colonial structures that have shaped the discipline—its objects of study, its canons, its methods, and its institutional frameworks—while creating space for alternative epistemologies, voices, and visual traditions. It is not a metaphor for the political project of Land Back or the material repatriation of Indigenous land and sovereignty; rather, it is a pedagogical and interpretive practice that seeks to unsettle the inherited hierarchies of knowledge that art history has historically reproduced. 

In this context, decolonizing means teaching art history as a field shaped by colonial entanglements and global circulations rather than as a self-contained narrative from the Global North. It involves centering Indigenous, African, Asian, and Latin American perspectives; engaging with artists, scholars, and audiences as co-producers of meaning; and foregrounding the ethics of representation, collection, and interpretation. Decolonizing the survey, then, is less a finished goal than an ongoing commitment—to teach art history as a contested, interconnected, and evolving story of the world’s visual cultures. 

My training in visual studies, critical theory, and Global South perspectives on visual culture cued me into these shifts and changes in art history curricula at the college level. When I joined the faculty at Appalachian State University in 2021, I proposed adopting a new textbook for the art history surveys—The History of Art: A Global View. At the time, my program area was using an art textbook that held sway in the field since the mid-1990s. To my mind, it is more global in scope than previous art history textbooks but is still firmly rooted in the outdated ideological structure of the art history survey and its Euro-U.S. values. 

After I class tested The History of Art: A Global View and reported back to colleagues, my Art History and Visual Culture program area adopted the textbook for our art history surveys several years ago. Since then, I have taught many iterations of my Global Art History, 1400–Present survey course—two sections (about 60 students total) per semester, nearly every semester, for the last five years. In what follows, I offer some of my thoughts, strategies, and best practices for using The History of Art: A Global View to globalize and decolonize your approach to the art history survey. 

Two Structures, One Theme 

I teach Global Art History, 1400–Present using two main structuring formats—one that begins with global contemporary art; another that proceeds chronologically from the fifteenth century to the present day. When we begin with global contemporary art, the initial focus is on why contemporary art must be global. Students are introduced to the global contemporary art market and international art fairs. We look at five contemporary artists that exhibit internationally and are from the five major regions of the world that we cover during the rest of the semester. I choose artists that draw from the themes and traditions of their home countries while also taking inspiration from the nations where they now live, work, travel, and exhibit in a globalized world. Thus, we are studying the hybridity of global visual culture in the contemporary moment. The thematic and aesthetic threads that students investigate in these five artists’ works carry through the rest of the semester as we visit the origins of the cultural traditions associated with each artists’ home world region.  

In both iterations of the course that I have alternated between on a semester-by-semester basis, I utilize a central theme that provides a connecting thread and passage through the course material. The theme, “Colonial Histories and Legacies,” considers the ways in which visual and material cultures and their making have been entangled in and affected by colonialism. Starting with the fifteenth century offers the opportunity to look at the art and visual culture of pre-contact global cultures, then directly following colonial expansion, within the post-colonial process, and in the contemporary moment with its decolonizing imperatives. Set up this way, study of European masterworks of the early modern era, once the center of art historical inquiry, only takes place following ample context regarding the Euro-U.S. colonial project. Thus, the wealth and splendor of the Renaissance, for example, can only be understood as part and parcel of colonial exploitation. This is a seismic shift in pedagogical approach from the “Western Civilizations” model of art history surveys that served as the standard for so long.  

The History of Art: A Global View makes this thematic framing quite manageable, as the chapters are compact and self-sustaining enough to sample in a variety of ways without losing continuity in the narrative arc of the  course. Additionally, chapters and supplementary text sections foreground contexts around power, imperialism, and colonialism in accessible and historically grounded ways. Features such as “Seeing Connections” offer short, pithy, and concrete comparative examples that facilitate cross-cultural connections and foster transitions and pivots between different regions and time periods.  

Varying Course Content Delivery 

I organize my survey course into six units, each consisting of four class meetings wherein content delivery and learning activities take several different forms: readings from the textbook, “artist studies,” “art studies,” and group discussion. I cover three chapters from the textbook that pertain to a region in a range of time periods and deliver interactive lectures in which students respond to prompts on my slides with short written responses, brief small group discussions, and all-class debriefs.  “Artist studies” are in-depth investigations and analysis of a particular artists’ work from one of the chapters, which may take the form of additional reading, video viewing, perusing online exhibitions, and/or doing formal and contextual analysis with a key image. “Art studies” provide the aforementioned hands-on art activities that pertain to unit material. Group discussion days are class sessions in which students get into small groups that they keep all semester, so they have an opportunity to really bond with each other and become comfortable with dialogue about course material. I provide a group discussion assignment worksheet, which outlines a collaborative activity with any combination of recalling key themes, terms, and connections between textbook chapters from the unit; and/or practicing visual and contextual analysis, comparative analysis, critical thinking, and writing practice. 

Scavenger Hunting 

One of my students’ most beloved activities during the survey course is also one of the first we do. At the beginning of the semester, I use the “Introduction” chapter from The History of Art: A Global View to talk about visual analysis. Then I give students a Scavenger Hunt assignment, in which we visit our campus nature preserve. I provide students with a list of those visual characteristics that they may encounter in the natural environment and which correspond to some of the visual elements we will be looking for all semester in art and visual culture study. These include warm colors, cool colors, negative space, multitonal, symmetry, asymmetry, striated, ascending, descending, opaque, translucent, etc. Students are asked to find and identify as many of the visual elements as possible, taking photographs with their phones or a camera to document their findings. After the walk, students create one Google slide for a collaborative class slideshow that includes their name and a collage of photographs labeled with the visual element(s) identified within them. At our next class meeting, we watch the slideshow together and debrief the activity.  

Hands-On Activities 

The “Seeing Connections” and “Making It Real” features in The History of Art: A Global View provide inspiration for the hands-on art activities I include in my survey courses, activities that are resoundingly students’ favorite part of the course.  I call the hands-on art activities “art studies”; they give students the opportunity to explore some of the techniques, media, and processes related to the cultural and historical contexts we are reading about. For example, I use the “Making It Real: Polychrome Woodblock Printing” section in Chapter 44, “Art in Early Modern Korea and Japan, 1600–1900” as inspiration to create a block printing exercise we can do in class that needs very little skill and just a few basic materials (pre-carved linoleum blocks, water-based ink, and paper). Students can see, feel, and experience a relief printing technique and the ways in which layering colors can create a multidimensional effect.  

Scaffolded Writing Practice and Skill Building 

Lecture-based class sessions also include low-stakes writing exercises and more formal writing workshops. In-class writing exercises may be one-minute freewrites in response to looking closely at an image or a prompt question, or an exercise I call “Onion-Skin Freewrite.” “Onion-Skin Freewrite” starts with a prompt related to closely looking at an image on a slide. Then I ask students to freewrite for three minutes on the prompt. For example, we look at Hosteen Klah’s Whirling Log Ceremony from Chapter 41, “Art of Mesoamerica and North America after 1300.” The prompt may be: “What aspects of the color, composition, and figural elements in this weaving seem like they may be key to its meaning and/or cultural significance?” Once three minutes is up, I ask students to look at what they have written and underline, highlight, or circle one word or phrase that seems important, and to make that the heading for another freewrite, this time two minutes long. We repeat that process for the last freewrite, one minute long. Finally, I ask students to pick out one word that seems key—like a golden nugget that distills their reflection on the original image. Students then take turns calling out their word while I write them on the board in a word cloud. This exercise results in a word cloud that encapsulates our best thinking in the moment about the image and its potential meanings.  

During writing workshops, I introduce or reinforce scaffolded writing skills that prepare students for writing their final comparative essays. They may be related directly to submitted writing assignments paced throughout the semester — a Formal and Contextual Analysis Assignment (a two-page analysis of one artwork/ artifact), a Thesis Statement assignment (drafting an argument comparing and/or contrasting two artworks/ artifacts), and a Compare/ Contrast essay assignment (a 3–5 page essay including all of the previous written components edited into a well-structured essay). The writing workshops may also cover basic guidelines for writing about art; grammar pitfalls, tips, and reminders; citation overview and practice; and basic essay structure and formatting. 

Conclusion 

At the heart of my approach to the second half of the global art history survey outlined here is the hope that students come away with a sense of art history as a living, multimodal, and relational field—one that is not simply a timeline of masterworks, but a network of encounters, exchanges, and negotiations that continue to shape the visual worlds we inhabit. By engaging with The History of Art: A Global View alongside activities that connect the classroom to embodied and creative forms of learning, students begin to see art not as distant heritage but as something to think and feel through. They learn to situate images, objects, and practices within broader questions of power, identity, and world-making, and to recognize their own positions within those dynamics. 

The combination of using this textbook and the active-learning framework it enables has created space for success in the classroom—both for my students and for myself as an instructor navigating the challenges of large survey courses. The book’s concise, modular structure and thematic emphasis on global interconnection provide a flexible scaffolding for a pedagogy grounded in curiosity, participation, and critical thinking. The hands-on art studies, writing workshops, artist studies, and outdoor visual exercises invite students to take ownership of their learning and to build community and confidence as they move from observation to analysis to creative interpretation. To other instructors taking on the survey and looking for new inspiration about how to do so, I would say: lean into the complexity. Globalizing and decolonizing the survey is not about finding a perfect syllabus, but about cultivating an ethos of ongoing revision—one that acknowledges the power of our teaching to shape how art history is imagined and practiced. Each semester is an opportunity to ask anew: whose stories are being told, whose remain untold, and how can our classrooms become sites where those stories meet, overlap, and continue to expand. 

To explore Dr. Affourtit’s syllabus and other teaching resources, request access here and learn more about the forthcoming second edition of The History of Art: A Global View. 

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