Recruiting has started for the 2019 Art, History, and Global Citizenship Paris May Term at Hope College!  (Apply here by Nov. 12).  As we prepare for May of 2019, we reflect back on several highlights from this past May.

The 2018 edition of the Paris May Term was a big success.  We loved engaging a new group of students with the city of Paris in all of its beauty but also all of its history and complexity.  We left before the World Cup, but at least we were in Paris for a bit of this amazing summer of Les Bleus! 

One new addition to the 2018 May Term program was a final project by our history and art history students. Their final projects required that they create Smarthistory-style videos analyzing a piece of artwork or historic site. We are sharing a couple of these videos here. (Check out Smarthistory and their awesome videos here.) These engaging student videos are excellent examples of the critical thinking needed to bring history and art history together in a compelling analysis, and they provide interesting glimpses into two remarkable Parisian museums.

Cherish Joe (Studio Art, ‘20) and Maddie Zimmerman (Art History/Chinese, ‘20) take us into the Musée Quai Branly and discuss not only King Ghezo’s Throne but also Benin art in general and the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on the Kingdom of Benin and its artistic production. They also offer a critique of the Musée Quai Branly itself.  

Kelly Ocock (Studio Art, ‘19) and Merrit Kramer (Business, 2021) analyze Marc Chagall’s “Derrière le village,” 1916, as they observed it in the “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk (1918-1922)” exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.  They analyze this piece in the context of other art from the period and in the historical context of World War I.

We look forward to May 2019 – come join us!