UCLA’s Art History Undergraduate Student Association is painting a colorful community for art history lovers.

AHUSA is a student-led club dedicated to exploring art history through discussion, faculty speakers and gallery visits. Its biweekly meetings in Dodd Hall are open to all undergraduate students, whether or not they major in art history. Nikki St. Charles, a fourth-year art history student and AHUSA’s president, said the club’s purpose is to aid students in their passion and curiosity in the arts and history through friendly, casual seminars.

“Not all art is a three-hour lecture or history lesson,” St. Charles said. “Art can be fun. Art can be very inspirational and personal. I would hope to inspire others like a lot of art has inspired me.”

St. Charles said she has been interested in art since childhood, as her mother would take her to museums such as the Getty Villa and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She also said she took art classes in high school, but upon realizing she wasn’t necessarily committed to creating art herself, she pursued art history instead. Currently, she is applying to graduate school for art history studies with an ancient Mediterranean studies focus, which has inspired the many graduate school-focused meetings at the club, she said.

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Fourth-year anthropology student Emma Bertoutian said the club’s ability to connect students with professors and provide graduate school resources creates crucial opportunities for those pursuing a career in the field. She added that the accessibility of these resources has influenced her own exposure to environments that speak to her interests in art and cultural heritage. Looking to become a museum curator and research associate in the future, Bertoutian said she has been able to explore this through the club’s events, such as a tour of the Fowler Museum’s collection.

“It gives you ideas about what you want to dedicate your life to, what you want to dedicate your education to,” Bertoutian said. “That’s great that they were able to achieve that with a meeting like that.”

AHUSA member Abbie Smolyar, a first-year world arts and cultures student, said she joined the club this past November when looking for a group to discuss art history with, as she feels humanities students are an underrepresented demographic. She added that the club allows her to discuss aspects of art history that are important to her, such as the representation of minorities in museum curation. As someone who hopes to become a head curator one day, Smolyar said that her goal would be to feature art that represents demographics other than European men.

“It’s an intrinsic choice, in my opinion, to go with a museum like the Fowler that does include art made by these demographics (women and people of color), rather than another bigger institution,” Smolyar said. “I feel like the main goals of the club is to feature this kind of art that isn’t so often talked about or recognized or readily available.”

As the club’s president, St. Charles said she wants to encourage discussion about personal interests and art that can be inspiring to individual members. For example, she said students sometimes come into the club with their own interests, such as comic books or anime. However, the club is also welcoming to students with little to no art history experience, she said.

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St. Charles said she has an interest in Greek art and sculptures. Upon taking archaeology classes about Greece and Rome, she said she found the roots of the ancient world and its impact on later art especially fascinating. As such, acknowledging these origins at AHUSA is especially important to her, she said.

“Especially with this generation, with AI or AI art becoming so prevalent, and you don’t know what’s AI anymore, I want to challenge the future and technology,” St. Charles said. “I want to remind people how important ancient art and archaeology is and how that’s the basis of our foundation.”

In addition to her membership in AHUSA, Bertoutian said she is the president of UCLA’s Archaeology Club. Through this role, she said she has been working alongside AHUSA’s board members to create a collaboration event, as she believes the fields of archaeology and art history complement each other. She added that UCLA’s large campus can lend itself to feeling lost in the crowd as a student, so it is important to find places to call your own, which is what she has found at AHUSA.

“It’s very motivating to be around people who are just as passionate as you are about tangible history, about interpreting art in such a meaningful way and always growing with the way that we are interpreting different artists, different types of works, what it means in our cultural context and our societal context,” Bertoutian said.