Nicole Woods
Art Historian, Modern and Contemporary Loyola Marymount University
- Los Angeles CA
Media
Biography
Dr. Woods is presently writing a book on abstract-figurative painter Bob Thompson (1937-1966) and his role in early Happenings. This research has been generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation | Arts Writers Grant, the Getty Research Library, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A third book project surveys the convergence of feminism, political radicalism, and expanded media art practices in the late 1960s-1970s in southern California. She is also writing an article on a number of US-based artists who engaged food and food culture as an artistic practice in the 1970s, including Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara T. Smith, Liz Phillips, and Alison Knowles.
Her essays and criticism have appeared in Art Journal, Performance Research, X-TRA: A Contemporary Art Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, caa.reviews, and The Walker Art Center, among others.
Woods is the recipient of several internationally competitive grants and fellowships, including The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2017 and 2022); and The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, IL (2018).
Before joining LMU, she taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of California, Irvine.
Education
UCLA
Bachelors
Art History
UC Irvine
Masters
Art History, Visual Studies, Critical Theory
UC Irvine
PhD
Art History, Visual Studies, Critical Theory
Social
Areas of Expertise
Affiliations
- College Art Association
- Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
Links
- Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus
- By Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)
- The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies
- The Andy Warhol Foundation|Arts Writers Grant
Event Appearances
Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate School
"House of Dust: A Poem in Process" New York, NY
2016-09-16
"Ritual, in Situ: Art, Food, Performance in Alison Knowles's Make a Salad"
Proposition #2: Make a Salad (Plein air variation) by Alison Knowles Aspen Art Museum
2018-07-15
"Bearing Witness: Bob Thompson's Immanent Color"
The Undergraduate Program in Religious Studies Annual Lecture University of Chicago Divinity School
"The Happening: Celebrating Bob Thompson"
Bob Thompson: This House is Mine Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
2022-05-14
“Participatory Ecologies and The House of Dust: Land Art, Conceptualism, Counter-Publics”
Reframing the House of Dust: A Symposium REDCAT/CalArts
2018-03-24
"On the House of Dust and early 1970s Politics"
by Alison Knowles: A Symposium Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2022-10-15
Research Grants
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow
The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
2022-02-01
As the Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, I have been conducting research into his vast corpus, aiming to reconsider the motivations for his elision from the histories of art of the 1960s, and offering an accounting of his practice as one purposely set outside the established painterly taxonomies of the era. An abstract figurative painter who referenced the Western tradition, Thompson produced canvases that are indeed startling, not only in terms of sheer aesthetic output but in the style of his painting. An ardent admirer of old master works of the 15th through 17th centuries, throughout his short career Thompson produced inimitable appropriations (“variations,” as he called them) that aspired to the complex painterly practices of Nicolas Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Francisco Goya. He effectively expanded recurrent motifs as points of departure to create his own private world, one that is brilliantly colored to declare a faith in nature as the source of life.
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow
The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
2017-09-30
During my residency at CASVA, my book manuscript on Alison Knowles was significantly broadened and deepened by late-stage writing and archival research. In addition to the exceptionally rich materials in the National Gallery of Art Library, including a remarkable collection of Fluxus books and vertical files, I was able to closely examine Something Else Press artists’ pamphlets, a large folio of prints by John Cage, and rare pieces of concrete poetry. I also greatly benefited from regular access to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, which holds Fluxus files and ephemera; the Dick Higgins Papers, 1958–1997; and transcripts of oral histories of key Fluxus artists, including Knowles.
Individual Research Grant
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Chicago, IL
2018-07-25
Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus is the first monograph of American artist, Alison Knowles (b. 1933), the only female member among Fluxus' founding ranks. It charts Knowles's transformative corpus as it evolved from abstract painting in the late 1950s, to silkscreens, print media, and performance in the early 1960s, to groundbreaking works in digital poetry, acoustical art, and large-scale installations in the late 1960s–1970s.
Arts Writers Grant
The Andy Warhol Foundation
2020-03-02
In “Acid Visions: Bob Thompson, Abstract Figurative Painting, and the American Neo-Avant-Garde,” Nicole L. Woods will look at the work of the pioneering African-American artist Bob Thompson. This article will foreground Thompson’s abstract figurative painting within the rich African-American cultural milieu of New York in the late 1950s and 1960s (in particular, improvisational jazz and Beat poetry), and will argue that Thompson’s vibrant abstract imagery speaks to an uneasy correspondence to art history’s complicated reaction to African-American artists experimenting with radical forms.
Courses
Global Modernism
A survey of the historical development of global modernism and modernity from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In particular, the class connects the spread of European modernism to religious, political, philosophical, and colonial movements.
Contemporary Art
An exploration of post-World War II art, with an emphasis on the development of postmodernism from 1945 to the early twenty-first century.
Articles
Pop Gun Art: Niki de Saint Phalle and the Operatic Multiple
The Walker Art CenterNicole L. Woods
"Niki de Saint Phalle and the Operatic Multiple" Nicole L. Woods
Taste Economies: Alison Knowles, Gordon Matta-Clark and the Intersection of Food, Time, and Performance
Performance Research2025-08-20
In this essay, I briefly reconsider two works in the late 1960s/early 1970s that explored food as an object of contemplation, consumption and display, tracing how the historical formation of the event-score offers an engagement of everyday life centred on an economy of artistic exchange. By making, distributing and highlighting food itself as an object-experience, these artists ultimately question the very organization of cultural capital and reveal the political effects of art that move beyond mere sustenance and conviviality into a realm of perceptual generosity.
