Nicole Woods
Art Historian, Modern and Contemporary | Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, UNITED STATES
Biography
Nicole L. Woods is an art historian and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Loyola Marymount University. Her research focuses on the Euro-American neo-avant-gardes, performance and conceptual art, intersectional feminism, critical
theory, globalism and taste cultures, and the history of photography and time-based media. Her current book project is the first in-depth study of the diverse practice of pioneering Fluxus artist, Alison Knowles (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, fall
2025). She is the scholarly consultant for the premier retrospective of Knowles’s life and work (Berkeley Art Museum, 2022-26), funded by the Terra Foundation.
She is presently writing a book on African American painter Bob Thompson and his role in early Happenings, for which I was recently awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. A second project surveys the convergence of feminism, political radicalism, and
expanded media art practices in the late 1960s-1970s in the Americas. 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.
Woods's research has been generously supported by Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (Arts Writers Grant); The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C.; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, IL. Before joining LMU, she taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of California, Irvine.
Education (3)
UCLA: Bachelors, Art History
UC Irvine: Masters, Art History, Visual Studies, Critical Theory
UC Irvine: PhD, Art History, Visual Studies, Critical Theory
Links (4)
Research Grants (1)
The Graham Foundation
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Nicole L. Woods is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Notre Dame. She holds concurrent appointments in the Department of Film, Television, and Theater, and the Program in Gender Studies. In Fall 2017, she held the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC. Woods has written and published widely on Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and other experimental artists of the post-WWII era in peer-reviewed journals. In 2016, she was invited to give a lecture at The Graduate Center at The City University of New York on Knowles's computer-generated environmental poem, “The House of Dust” and will give an expanded lecture on Knowles at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) theater, REDCAT, in 2018. Her monograph positions her as the singular expert on Knowles's practice, and as a result she has been invited to serve as Curatorial-Scholarly Consultant for the first major career retrospective on Knowles's life and art. Among other tasks related to the success of the exhibition, Woods will write the lead essay in the catalogue raisonné, which will for the first time provide an extensive survey of Knowles's critical practice to a wider public. She is currently finishing an essay on the "relational archive" for the Archives of American Art Journal.
Articles (1)
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
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