For many students—including myself in the 1990s—the AP course was a blitzkrieg through centuries of art history. The College Board’s previous materials never specified that instructors acquaint students with a particular list of works. Because the entire textbook was up for grabs, teachers often drilled students on vast amounts of information and showed their classes over 1,000 works—hoping enough of them would look familiar to test takers on the year’s given AP exam. This scattershot approach left teachers little time to discuss the definition of art, how it changes, and why particular works acquire meaning—the kind of fluency demanded by upper-level college courses. The new emphasis on a defined set of work does give teachers considerably less leeway over which art to teach, but the redesigned framework is more focused and less didactic. It’s a finite universe meant to encourage better analysis, leaving room to teach art history, as opposed to spending so much energy on pattern recognition.

The course’s second problem, however, proved to be much more complex: It mirrored the broad cultural bias found in the art world—and rewriting history is a painstaking process. As with most art-history classes, the old test was largely Eurocentric, according to John Williamson, the vice president of AP curriculum, instruction, and assessment at the College Board. Roughly 65 percent of the course content is still art considered within the Western tradition. Now, 35 percent—around 87 artworks—come from “other artistic traditions.”

Efforts to diversify the AP reflect a larger push in the art world to integrate artists who were formerly discounted or altogether ignored. Curators and educators told me it’s time to correct the way students—both on school campuses and at museums—learn art history. For decades, women and artists of color have been absent from history books and museum walls, likely giving students of all backgrounds the impression that seminal artwork is produced only by a certain type of artist, by certain accepted cultures. Campaigns have sought to change the status quo, including the anonymous group known as Guerilla Girls, which has been creating posters and flyers since the 1980s that critique art-world sexism and racism, documenting the low number of women and minorities represented by galleries and shown in major museums. Members wear gorilla masks and assume the aliases of dead female artists. I corresponded with an artist who uses the pseudonym of a German painter and sculptor, “Käthe Kollwitz,” who died in 1945.

Guerilla Girls

“If you were to believe what many of us were taught in school and museums, you would think a clear line of achievement links one genius innovator to the next,” the Guerillas wrote in their 1998 book on the history of Western art. The very acceptance of a “mainstream,” they explained, reduces centuries of artistic output to “a bunch of white male masterpieces and movements” because art by women and people of color often don’t meet historians’ criteria for “quality.”