Faculty Connections
The Galleries provide innovative pedagogic spaces for faculty to extend their classrooms. By connecting their curricula, faculty can promote close-looking, help students develop object-based research skills, and offer interdisciplinary, historical or cultural context, while engaging students through hands-on learning.
Teaching in the Galleries
The Galleries are your classroom! To learn what co-facilitated class session might entail, take a look at this video of Deborah Donahue-Keegan’s Education for Peace and Justice Studies students in the Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe exhibition during the Fall 2024 semester.
With advance notice, objects from the Permanent Collection can be pulled from storage for class visits or research. You can browse the collection database or one of the topical Collection Guides.
Contact TUAG’s Manager of Academic Programs to learn more.
Collection Guides
Created by TUAG staff and graduate fellows, our Collection Guides take a closer look at the many fascinating throughlines of the Tufts University Art Galleries’ Permanent Collection.
By diving deep into unifying themes like Protest Art and Portraits and Identity, these guides suggest curricular connections, prompt further discussion, and promote interdisciplinary learning.
Explore Collection Guides
Protest Art
Throughout history, art has been used to assert, explore, and capture movements of public protest and resistance, often reflecting artists’ political beliefs. This guide takes a look at three forms of protest art found in the Tufts University Permanent Art Collection: ephemera (posters and buttons), photography, and paintings. Each mode of art offers its own strengths and poignancy, themes and symbols, showcasing the multitude of ways that resistance, protest, and resilience are expressed globally.
Climate Change and the Environment
Humanity’s relationship with the environment is continuously evolving, particularly as the need to understand and prevent climate change becomes more urgent. This guide explores the many artists who have made the changing environment their subject, documenting human intervention in the natural world and calling attention to our role within it.
Portraits and Identity
Portraits have existed in many cultures for many reasons, such as solidifying reigns or commemorating the dead. The Tufts University Permanent Art Collection, like many other collections, is full of portraits of many kinds: self-portraits, official college portraits of presidents past, artistic explorations of identity and the portrait genre. This guide explores what these images tell us about the people they show and about how identity is viewed and constructed.
