NEW – Uptown, Midtown, Downtown: An Art-Historical Tour of New York City
Dr Tom Day
Monday 13 to Friday 17 October 2025
£825
This tour is now fully booked but we are happy to receive applications for the waiting list and/or expressions of interest for a re-run at a future date: please email us at short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk.
Course description
In this study tour we will explore the art-historical past of one of the globe’s most dynamic cultural capitals: New York City.
Covering the 20th century, we will witness dramatic shifts in New York’s landscape of visual culture as we examine movements from Realism to Abstract Expressionism, and Happenings, to Pop and Minimalism. Paying particular attention to the role the metropolis itself played as an incubator of artists and art forms, we will unpack these shifts as closely linked to the politics of urban life. We will witness the reinvention of New York’s industrial spaces as artist colonies in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond, taking in the reshaped and gentrified neighbourhoods left long after the artists have moved out. Across five days we will visit a variety of museum collections, galleries and art institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art; Artists Space; White Columns; the Brooklyn Museum; the Queens Museum; the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, La Plaza Cultural; the commercial galleries of SoHo and Chelsea and will take a short trip upstate to DIA:Beacon, a world-leading collection of minimal and conceptual art housed in a former biscuit factory.
Lecturer's biography
Dr Tom Day is a historian of American Art and Film, Video and Media art. He has previously held teaching and research positions at the University of Edinburgh and the Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently adjunct professor at The New School in New York City. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in publications including Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Panorama and British Art Studies and he has contributed chapters to number of edited collections. He is currently working on a book entitled Drop Dead: Art, Urban Crisis and The End of New York which explores the multifaceted decline and neo-liberalization of New York City through the prism of art and artists thinking about public space, housing, sanitation and policing.