My chief goal in teaching art history is two fold: to encourage students to see and understand works of art in their original contexts; and to try to understand why and how they continue to speak to us. I focus on why works were made and why they looked the way they did.

Art is all about communicating with and touching the viewer. It must engage people and a society, and reflect the concerns of its creator, era, and locale for it to have any chance of continuing to speak meaningfully to later generations.

I stress that students must know what has been done before so that they will not just repeat what others have done. Moreover, by learning why earlier artists worked as they did, they will acquire some better idea of why they themselves think and work as they do, and be better equipped to understand and master more sophisticated means of expression