Art History & Curatorial Studies Minor

This minor provides students with the flexibility to study art history and curatorial studies, while also pursuing another academic major. Students develop skills in the areas of critical thinking, research, writing, and communication, and many opt to see art first hand by attending one of BYU's many Study Abroad programs.

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She has presented and published widely in feminist art history, and particularly on women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art and society. Recently, she has turned her attention to the fields of Utah and Mormon studies. Professor Belnap is the author, with Corry Cropper and Daryl Lee, of Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-century France (University of Illinois Press, 2022), winner of the John Whitmer Historical Association's 2023 Best Book Award. She has co-edited two books, Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 (Ashgate, 2011) and Women, Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 (Routledge, 2014) and published numerous articles and essays in feminist art history and cultural studies. Her most recent publications include a guest editing a special issue on midcentury women in Utah art for the Utah Historical Quarterly (Fall 2023) and the book section, "The Mormon-LDS Art Tradition," in Variations on Christian Art: Mennonite, Mormon, Quaker and Swedenborgian, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Some of her current projects include two exhibitions, Work and Wonder: Two Centuries of Latter-day Saint Art (Church History Museum, Fall 2024) and Materializing Mormonism: Trajectories in Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art (Mesa Arts Center, Spring 2024) with (with co-curators Brontë Hebdon and Ashlee Whitaker), a volume on Mormon artist Minerva Teichert for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series; and book and exhibition projects tentatively titled, Artistic Frontiers: Women and the Making of the Utah Art Scene, 1880-1940 (with Emily Larsen). She hopes to complete a book manuscript in her primary field of research, Modernity's Muses: Women, Art, and Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris, in 2025.

Professor Belnap teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, modern and contemporary art, women in art, Latter-day Saint art, and global women's studies.

Dr. Belnap is also actively engaged in professional and civic organizations, particularly those involved in the advancement of women in the visual arts. She served as the chair of CAA’s Services to Historians of the Visual Arts Committee (2021-2024) and was a member of the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (2015-2018). She is the Utah representative for The Feminist Art Project and was honored in Jann Haworth’s Utah Women 2020 mural as one of 250 or so women past and present who have shaped the state’s culture.

Elliott D. Wise completed a B.A. and M.A. in Art History at Brigham Young University in 2007 and 2009, respectively. In 2016 he received a Ph.D. in Art History from Emory University, studying the Northern Renaissance as his major field and medieval art as his minor field. He spent a semester at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a year in New York City as a fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His dissertation explores the affinity between vernacular mystical literature in the Low Countries and panel paintings by Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1399–1464) and Robert Campin (c. 1375–1445). His research and publications focus on the devotional function of late medieval and early modern art. In particular, he is interested in art and liturgy, representations of the Eucharistic Christ and the Virgin Mary, and the visual culture of the great mendicant and monastic orders.

Kenneth Hartvigsen is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Comparative Arts & Letters, and previously served for six years as the curator of American Art at the BYU Museum of Art. He holds a doctorate in art history from Boston University where he studied American Art and visual culture. Kenneth also maintains an active art studio practice and occasionally exhibits his paintings in Provo and in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

Erik Odin Yingling is a scholar trained in the history of art and religion. He teaches classes on the art of ancient Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. His research examines questions about mythical and religious art during the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity, including cross-cultural exchanges (Classical, early Christian, some Egyptian). An ongoing interest, the subject of his dissertation explores the “metamorphic imagination": the perception of bodily change and soulful identity in images of mythical transformation. His theoretical concerns include questions about the reception of images, including their evocative material qualities, sensory charms, ritual movements, enchantments, disenchantments, and pareidolic illusions in the natural environment. He has also published (and co-authored) papers on topics related to artistic forgery, authenticity, and the restoration of textual lacunae in damaged Coptic artifacts.