About us
Ohio State’s Master’s program in Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice (CACP) is the only program of its kind to be located within a major research university. The program makes the most of that fact by being fully interdisciplinary.
Although housed within the History of Art Department, it involves coursework in other departments, including Comparative Studies and Arts Administration, as well as at the Moritz College of Law and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. A curatorial Internship places students in contemporary arts institutions around Columbus and Ohio, including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Pizzuti Collection.
The program is designed to meet all of the standards set by the College Art Association for curatorial studies programs and is one of only a handful of programs in the U.S. that does so. Its curriculum insures that students will get both a solid grounding in art history as a discipline (as opposed to simply a familiarity with recent artistic practices) and the training in things like grant-writing, legal contracts, and nonprofit management essential to contemporary curatorial practice.
The MA is designed to fully prepare students for a curatorial career in the field of contemporary art and to provide them with sufficient art-historical training that they could move directly into doctoral study, should they decide to take that course instead.