Art History Conversations

Coming Soon to Shoebox Arts

Art history changed how I see everything.

I have degrees in art history and studio art. I taught art history and I loved it. And if you're not enrolled in a university right now, you don't have easy access to it. You can read a biography or walk through a museum, but that's not the same as sitting with someone who can talk about the philosophy, trace the through lines, and connect what happened then to what's being made right now and to what you're making in your own studio.

That's what these conversations are.

Not the survey version. Not dates and movements to memorize. The through lines version. How specific artists and movements gave permission to everything that came after them. And how you can trace that permission directly into contemporary practice today.

What these conversations are about

Every conversation follows the same arc. An artist, a movement, a moment that changed what was possible. What they opened up. What they gave permission for. And how you can see that permission alive in the work being made right now, including your own.

Art history is not just about the past. It's a tool for understanding your own present.

A taste of what's coming

The Legacy of Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp didn't just put a urinal in a gallery. He was responding to a whole history of what art was supposed to be and he blew it open. Everything that followed, conceptual art, institutional critique, relational aesthetics, performance, the idea that the idea is the art, traces back to that gesture. We'll trace it forward into what artists are doing right now.

Ana Mendieta: The Body, Land, and Belonging

Ana Mendieta died too young and her work is more relevant now than it has ever been. Her earth-body works, her Silueta series, her explorations of displacement, identity, and the body as site gave permission to an entire generation of artists working with presence, absence, and belonging. We'll talk about her practice, her life, and the enormous shadow she cast.

Cindy Sherman and the Performance of Identity

Sherman didn't just dress up and take pictures. She was interrogating a whole history of how women have been represented in art, in film, in advertising. She turned the camera around. Images made by men of women as objects, she collapsed all of that into a single body of work that is still being felt everywhere. We'll trace how her work lives in contemporary photography, self-portraiture, and the entire visual language of identity online.

Andy Warhol: Permission to Collapse High and Low

Warhol didn't invent pop culture but he changed what art was allowed to do with it. Soup cans, celebrities, repetition, the Factory, the idea that commercial culture was as valid a subject as anything in a museum. The collapse of high and low that Warhol made possible is everywhere now. We'll trace it.

Feminist Art: History and Now

From Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro to Pattern and Decoration to the artists who are working right now, feminist art is one of the most important and consistently underrepresented threads in art history. We'll talk about what feminist artists fought for, what they built, who was left out even within that movement, and how that fight is continuing today.

Artists Who Were Rediscovered Late

Lee Bontecou. Lynda Benglis. The Pattern and Decoration artists. So many women who made extraordinary work, disappeared from the conversation, and had to be rediscovered decades later. Why does this happen? What does it tell us about who gets to make art history? And who is being overlooked right now that we'll be rediscovering in twenty years?

Art and Mass Media

How images work. How media constructs reality. How advertising, fine art, politics, and pop culture are all using the same visual language and most of us don't know how to read it. This conversation draws on the work of my former professor, advisor, and mentor Betty Ann Brown, who taught me to see images not as neutral objects but as constructed arguments. It will rewire how you look at everything.

Through Lines from the Renaissance to Today The longer view.

How ideas travel across centuries, how a problem that preoccupied a painter in the 1400s shows up in a sculpture from the 1970s and a video installation from last year. Representation, the body, space, narrative, abstraction. The deep through lines that connect everything.

How they work

All conversations on Zoom. Recorded so you never miss a session. Occasional field trips when we can make them happen.

Single sessions: 2 hours, one topic, one deep dive.

Month-long series: Four sessions going deep on one artist or movement, with time to look closely at work, ask questions, and connect what we're discussing to your own practice.

Who these are for

Artists who want to understand the history their work is in conversation with, whether they know it yet or not.

Artists who studied art but never had the art history that made it all make sense.

Artists who are self-taught and want the context that art school might have given them.

Collectors, writers, and anyone who loves art and wants to see it more deeply.

You don't have to be a professional artist. You just have to care about art.

Conversations are coming soon.

We're building the schedule now. To be the first to know when registration opens:

Join our mailing list: shoeboxarts.com

Read the full story of why we're doing this on Substack: shoeboxarts.substack.com

Questions? Email shoeboxartsla at gmail dot com

Kristine Schomaker is an artist, curator, writer, and educator based at the Brewery Arts Complex in Los Angeles. She holds degrees in art history and studio art and has been teaching, writing about, and making art for over 30 years. She is the founder of Shoebox Arts, Art and Cake, and Call and Response.