The MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture aims to train and equip specialists and researchers with skills in the historical and critical analysis of the most recent artistic developments, applying them to cultural production and management.    

The different forms of knowledge interwoven with contemporary art and visual culture flow beyond the traditional discipline-based structure of art history and the territory of local debate, demanding close-knit contact with general and multi-disciplinary debate in the international sphere.    

As a result, and despite the availability of similar post-graduate programmes at small universities which seek to resemble this course outline, only the joint action between two pre-eminent departments, the UAM’s (Autonomous University of Madrid) Art History and Theory Department and Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts Department, affiliated with its Department of Philosophy, and UCM’s (Complutense University of Madrid) Department of Art History, can offer the academic structure and lecturers required to create benchmark studies in Spain and internationally.       

Furthermore, the partnership with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía means certain unparalleled infrastructures and direct learning opportunities are incorporated and enhance the programme’s aspiration to become a reference point. This MA will serve as a comprehensive learning module as much as an academic platform for students who decide to develop their research in contemporary art history on a PhD level.      

 

Objectives and career growth

The MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture has been conceived to meet the demands of a diverse and complex market, constituting an instrument of specialisation and career growth for professionals such as cultural managers, professionals working in art-related publishing, professionals from the art market, museum educators, curators and independent critics, among others.

 

Why study this MA?

The joint participation of lecturers from UCM and UAM, dovetailing with specialists from the Museo Reina Sofía, enables efforts and energies to be concentrated and combined, giving rise to one of the highest-calibre academic courses in Spain and deploying the means to train a new generation of specialists in contemporary art on a par with other countries in our milieu.       

Moreover, the link with the Museo Reina Sofía endows the MA with social dissemination and a professional profile that demands a fresh definition of post-graduate studies, generating a major nexus of relations between the University and top-grade public institutions. 

 

The UCM’s MA Coordinators.

Coordinator: Rocío Robles Tardío

Adjunct Coordinator: Alicia Fuentes Vega

 

Further information:

The MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture on the Museo Reina Sofía website

Image: Bruce Nauman, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, 1968