School of Art Welcomes Christopher S. Wood to Visiting Lecture Series Today

Courtesy of Christopher S. Wood

Mermaid, 18c, Volga region, Museum of Folk Art, Moscow

The School of Art in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to welcome writer and historian Christopher S. Wood to the fall Visiting Lecture Series. All are invited to his lecture at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 26, at Hillside Auditorium 202. 

Wood's lecture, "What Was Folk Art?," will reflect on the past and possible future of folk art.

"For art history, folk art has been referenced as a bad object," Wood said. "Folk art, it would seem, distances itself from critical modernisms and may summon conservative and nostalgic emotions, reinforcing ethnicist or nationalist ideologies. The term 'folk' refers to an obsolete social category, and this talk reflects on the past and possible future of folk art by asking: what was it, really?"

Wood is currently a professor in the German Department at New York University. He has been a fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy in Berlin and Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

In 2023, he was Aby-Warburg-Stifung Professor at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg and earlier in his career, awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is the author of several books, including Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape; Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art; Anachronic Renaissance (with Alexander Nagel); A History of Art History; and The Embedded Portrait: Giotto, Giottino, Angelico. 

All are invited to join Wood's lecture at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 26 at Hillside Auditorium, 202.