In this episode, Allyson gets topical and talks about a Kehinde Wiley painting–but maybe not the one you think!
Art History For All Posts
Welcome to the inaugural episode of Art History for All! In this episode, Allyson tells you all about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the impact it’s had on Western culture, breaking it down from the Renaissance to Dan Brown and beyond.
© 2018 Allyson Healey
Theme music © 2018 Bruce Healey
“Lasting Hope”, “Suonatore di Liuto”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Here you’ll find a regularly-updated list with links to other digitally-based art history and humanities projects, as well as individuals and organizations whose mission or research interests align with AH4A‘s.
AH4A‘s Twitter lists (Collections of Twitter accounts that AH4A follows or which align with AH4A’s aims.)
Art History That (“A project created by Karen J. Leader and Amy K. Hamlin to curate, crowdsource, and collaborate on the future of art history.” Their website also hosts a crowd-sourced manifesto that enumerates specific goals for art history to work towards.)
McMansion Hell (A blog dedicated to roasting “McMansions” as well as deconstructing why exactly they are bad, in architectural history terms.)
The Material Collective (A group of primarily medievalist art historians dedicated to fostering “a safe space for alternative ways of thinking about objects.” Also dedicated to academic/art historical activism.)
Kimberly R. Drew (The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s social media manager, and the founder of the blog Black Contemporary Art.)
Hyperallergic (A progressive art news website that describes itself as “a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art and culture in the world today.)
Dash-Amerikan: Keeping Up With the Social Media Ecologies of the Kardashians (A digital project through the University of Virginia’s Scholars Lab that looks at the Kardashian-Jenner family and their various properties and social media presences through a critical lens.)
The Incluseum (In their own words: “The Incluseum is a project based in Seattle, Washington that advances new ways of being a museum through critical discourse, community building and collaborative practice related to inclusion in museums.” Includes a blog, a record of their exhibit The Power of Place, as well as tools to assist in catalyzing change in museum contexts.)
Study the Humanities (A toolkit for educators and administrators on how to promote the humanities to undergraduates. Also useful for students and parents to make the case for why the humanities are useful and necessary in our society. Created by the National Humanities Alliance.)
Artsy (An online magazine, art auction portal, and database of information about artists, artworks, exhibitions, and more.)
Lady Pod Squad (A group of female and non-binary podcasters dedicated to assisting one another in creating, marketing, and improving their podcasts, and also just making friends! Check out the #LadyPodSquad hashtag on social media to find other amazing member pods!)
Ethical EdTech (In their own words: “This is a directory, created by and for higher-ed educators, for sharing tools and use-cases. We believe that education can be a critical site through which to transform the broader tech industry and the cultures surrounding it.”)
The following projects are on hiatus, are defunct, or no longer update frequently:
Tabloid Art History (A Twitter and Instagram that posted comparisons of art from various periods with photos of celebrities. They’ve also released zines, available for free online and for purchase in physical form.)
About the Podcast
Art History for All is dedicated to increasing the accessibility of visual art by discussing how art from throughout human history is relevant to us right now. This podcast looks beyond the traditional art historical canon and considers a global history of art and material culture in a casual, conversational way. The core question we return to over and over again is essentially “so what?” Why would or should anyone care about a given work of art? What relevance does something from hundreds of years ago or thousands of miles away have to people in the here and now?
This podcast is dedicated to accessibility in the practical sense, as well, providing episode transcripts for those who find the podcasts difficult to listen to or understand in audio form, or those who want to be able to access citations and sourcing. Both audio podcasts and transcripts will include verbal descriptions of the central works discussed, for the benefit of those who cannot view them.
Beginning with episode 13, “Namatjira’s Creek,” episode topics have been chosen by using the Random Geographic Coordinate Generator on Random.org. After generating a random set of geographic coordinates, Allyson chooses the country or region nearest to those coordinates and seeks out works of art produced in that region or by someone from that region. This method is intended to keep the geographic and cultural scope of Art History for All as broad as possible, and hopefully to create a catalogue of episodes that are more representative of the art history of all humankind.
About Allyson Healey
Allyson Healey earned a Bachelor’s degree in art history from Scripps College in 2014, and a Master’s in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia in 2017. As an intern at Scripps’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Allyson assisted in the mounting of Clay’s Tectonic Shift, a Pacific Standard Time exhibition, in 2012. Along with other interns, they co-curated Archetypal Form: The Art of Performance, a small exhibition of photographs from Scripps’s permanent collections. Allyson also co-curated Modernizing Meiji, an exhibition of Japanese prints and decorative objects, along with other students of Meiji-period Japanese art in 2013. From 2012-2013 Allyson studied abroad at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where they received a thorough grounding in art historical theory. The primary focus of Allyson’s graduate work was British art of the 18th and 19th centuries, though they undertook coursework on a variety of art historical topics, from the material culture of the Silk Road, to the 18th century excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, to the sculpture and architecture of ancient India.
In addition to writing, recording, and producing Art History for All, Allyson currently works at a commercial gallery in West Hollywood, California, conducting research and building a database of information for a yet-to-be-announced catalogue raisonné project. If you’d like to get in touch, you can contact Allyson through the Art History for All Twitter or Instagram, or via email at email@example.com.