Kelli Wood
Kelli Wood is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and curator whose work combines methods from fields such as art history, art criticism, game studies, sports science, and museology.
In 2019 she joined the School of Art at the University of Tennessee as Assistant Professor of Art History - Museum & Curatorial Studies. Wood is also an Affiliate Faculty member with the Center for Sport, Peace, and Society.
In 2022 - 2023 Wood was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to India.vIn 2021 the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Wood a 12 month NEH-Mellon fellowship for Digital Publication. In January 2021 Wood was appointed Regional Editor for the Southeast for The New Art Examiner journal.
In 2024-2025 Wood will be a Berenson Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, and, an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy of Rome.
From 2016 through 2023 her major projects have and will focus on the relationship between art, games, and sports as mimetic representations from the sixteenth century onward. Her first book, The Art of Play in Early Modern Italy is under contract with Amsterdam University Press in their series Cultures of Play: 1300-1700. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships including a Fulbright at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, a Kress fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and a three year postdoc in the Michigan Society of Fellows.
Wood’s intellectual interests extend forward from the early modern period. Recent writings have taken a longue durée approach to sports and games, including topics that span from the early development of European football and printed board games to the rise of Victorian board games, 8-bit video games, and the influence of Title IX on women’s athletics. She has scholarly articles forthcoming on sixteenth century natural scientist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s encyclopedia of games, the early history of printed playing cards, and a historiographic investigation of the influence of ancient athletics on the development of museology and art history in the 18th century. Wood has guest curated a permanent wing of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, A Global History of Sport, which opened in March 2022 in advance of the FIFA World Cup.
From 2020 though 2024 Wood’s new scholarly projects turn toward sixteenth and seventeenth-century Goa, India as a port city. Archival research, field work, and invited talks in 2020 have explored the facture and circulation of shellcraft in the Indian ocean and material culture trade with Europe and South Asia. Upcoming talks consider Goan Baroque architectural, urban, and garden spaces as loci of performance, play, and use of material culture.
Wood offers both introductory and special topics courses at the University of Tennessee, including: Survey of Western Art II, Art of Italy 1250-1450, Art of Italy 1450-1600, Northern European Art 1350-1600, Global Baroque Art and Architecture, History of Museums and Collections, The Visual History of Sports and Games, and Video Game Art.
Dale G. Cleaver Assistant Professor
Art History
Museum & Curatorial Studies
School of Art
Affiliate Faculty Member
Center for Sport, Peace, and Society
The University of Tennessee
kwood29@utk.edu
https://art.utk.edu/arthistory/kelli-wood/
https://sportandpeace.utk.edu/our-team/
Regional Editor
The New Art Examiner
'An Independent Voice for the Visual Arts'
Est. 1973
http://www.newartexaminer.org/
Curator, "A Global History of Sport" gallery
Qatar Museums
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, opened March 2022
2018 - 2021
http://www.321.qa/
Postdoctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows
University of Michigan, 2016-2019
http://societyoffellows.umich.edu/
University of Chicago '16
Ph.D. Art History
In 2019 she joined the School of Art at the University of Tennessee as Assistant Professor of Art History - Museum & Curatorial Studies. Wood is also an Affiliate Faculty member with the Center for Sport, Peace, and Society.
In 2022 - 2023 Wood was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to India.vIn 2021 the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Wood a 12 month NEH-Mellon fellowship for Digital Publication. In January 2021 Wood was appointed Regional Editor for the Southeast for The New Art Examiner journal.
In 2024-2025 Wood will be a Berenson Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, and, an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy of Rome.
From 2016 through 2023 her major projects have and will focus on the relationship between art, games, and sports as mimetic representations from the sixteenth century onward. Her first book, The Art of Play in Early Modern Italy is under contract with Amsterdam University Press in their series Cultures of Play: 1300-1700. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships including a Fulbright at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, a Kress fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and a three year postdoc in the Michigan Society of Fellows.
Wood’s intellectual interests extend forward from the early modern period. Recent writings have taken a longue durée approach to sports and games, including topics that span from the early development of European football and printed board games to the rise of Victorian board games, 8-bit video games, and the influence of Title IX on women’s athletics. She has scholarly articles forthcoming on sixteenth century natural scientist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s encyclopedia of games, the early history of printed playing cards, and a historiographic investigation of the influence of ancient athletics on the development of museology and art history in the 18th century. Wood has guest curated a permanent wing of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, A Global History of Sport, which opened in March 2022 in advance of the FIFA World Cup.
From 2020 though 2024 Wood’s new scholarly projects turn toward sixteenth and seventeenth-century Goa, India as a port city. Archival research, field work, and invited talks in 2020 have explored the facture and circulation of shellcraft in the Indian ocean and material culture trade with Europe and South Asia. Upcoming talks consider Goan Baroque architectural, urban, and garden spaces as loci of performance, play, and use of material culture.
Wood offers both introductory and special topics courses at the University of Tennessee, including: Survey of Western Art II, Art of Italy 1250-1450, Art of Italy 1450-1600, Northern European Art 1350-1600, Global Baroque Art and Architecture, History of Museums and Collections, The Visual History of Sports and Games, and Video Game Art.
Dale G. Cleaver Assistant Professor
Art History
Museum & Curatorial Studies
School of Art
Affiliate Faculty Member
Center for Sport, Peace, and Society
The University of Tennessee
kwood29@utk.edu
https://art.utk.edu/arthistory/kelli-wood/
https://sportandpeace.utk.edu/our-team/
Regional Editor
The New Art Examiner
'An Independent Voice for the Visual Arts'
Est. 1973
http://www.newartexaminer.org/
Curator, "A Global History of Sport" gallery
Qatar Museums
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, opened March 2022
2018 - 2021
http://www.321.qa/
Postdoctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows
University of Michigan, 2016-2019
http://societyoffellows.umich.edu/
University of Chicago '16
Ph.D. Art History
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Videos by Kelli Wood
https://qm.org.qa/en/about-us/3-2-1-qatar-olympic-and-sports-museum/
Peer-Reviewed Articles & Chapters by Kelli Wood
Published Essays by Kelli Wood
positioned California as jejune within the art world,
superficial to the formidable genius emanating from
Empire City artists and as proclaimed by her equally eminent
critics. Yet since the 1950s Ed Ruscha has capitalized
on the urban contradictions and consumerist stereotypes
of Lotusland, garnering him international celebrity as an
artist synonymous with the city itself. Characteristically
Delphic, Ruscha once opined, “I’m dead serious about
being nonsensical.” His pithy vernacular paintings, photographs,
and prints have influenced pop, minimal, and
conceptual art movements worldwide, and his works
command considerable attention in the market today; In
November Ruscha’s citric Made in California litho (1971)
and liquid Ripe (1967) broke auction records selling for
$100,000 and $20 million.
Dr. Alexandra Schwartz has played the role of archivist,
historian, compiler, critic, and curator of Ruscha’s art for
over 20 years. The New Art Examiner spoke with her about
the concurrent journeys of Ruscha’s work and her writing.
(Physical copy in print, available early November)
Tragic losses of life and freedom motivated 15 artists to create works addressing the environment, the pandemic, and racism. A series of three colorful giclée prints by Marcus Maddox near the entrance offer a visual transition from a life now dominated by digital photography and screens into one possessed by objects and artworks. Straightaway however, Maddox’s Face Off (2020) boldly points outward again to sites where people have been demonstrating. In June, Maddox, a self-described fine art photographer who grew up in Tennessee, traveled to Philadelphia in solidarity with protests on the heels of the murder of George Floyd. An unknown man grips the ends of his durag as he takes a stance against injustice and brutality. With the uneasy stasis of photography, and a gaze from behind the man’s diagonally outstretched arms, Maddox’s art succinctly captures the inherent tension of protest and reorients us to the onerous political work of folks whose full personhood, bodies, and lives have been forever attacked in America. The discordance of the physical, visual, and metaphorical line leave no question. In 2020, the power of sight obligates us to stand for change. Acknowledging this is the price of entry into Red Arrow. It must become the price of entry into our social contract. Change.
in 3D exhibition software. Galleries and artists rely upon chic design and seamless functionality for websites accompanying brick-and-mortar shows and sales. Collection managers wrangle the kraken’s weighty and ever-expanding tentacles of data. Museums engage visitors through digital interactives and apps aimed at both education and entertainment. For many, the closures and isolation of the pandemic have clarified and amplified the possibilities and pitfalls that technology brings to media, old and new. For others, sights have been long set on the nexus of tech and object.
Duke University’s Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture has interrogated the potential of new computational work in the realm of the arts for over a decade. A recent partnership with Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art resulted in a fully online, interactive exhibition that was
ready to debut in September 2020 despite the museum’s physical closure in the wake of the pandemic.
Reviews & Art Criticism by Kelli Wood
“Posthumous Dialogues with F. N. Souza” celebrates the memory and continued impact of Souza’s legacy on con-temporary art in Goa and across India.
Renaissance born from tumult and built upon the aesthetics of an Italian leisure class invested in play. Giocare tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Games and gaming from the Middle Ages to the modern age) treats this play both in form and content. Francesca Aceto and Francesco Lucioli curate a collection of eleven creative essays engaging with Italian scholarship on games and play in medieval and early modern Europe in history, language, literature, and art. As the subtitle suggests, rules circumscribe both ethics and aesthetics, and the editors’ introduction portrays a ludic world evolving into one codified by regulation. The rhetoric of virtuous play too structures the dialogue of the contributors’ essays.
Taken as a whole, the essays’ interdisciplinary conversation evokes the intermedial nature of games as structures of both form and formfulness to the attentive ludologist.
Books by Kelli Wood
An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular ‘plaything’ is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.
FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY
Talks by Kelli Wood
professional work related to leisure. Girolamo Cardano classified sport as requiring two separate abilities, “agility of body, as with a ball; or of strength, as with a discus and in wrestling,” and in the sixteenth-century exercises which emphasized agility over brute strength increasingly gained prominence as venues for the salubrious maintenance of physique and the performance of aristocratic masculine virtue during social and political conduct. A rhetorical slippage between sport and war frequently manifested itself in both artistic representations of and the performance of sport in order to ascribe the virtues of virility to aristocratic athletes. Yet the real or potential corporeal dominance of a brawny artisanal class, a “rivalry not of birth, but of strength and ability, wherein villagers are quite a match for
nobles,” in the words of Castiglione, also fundamentally influenced the regulation and representation of bodies through sport. The rising need for a professional class of athletes paid to perform on the street and as salaried
members of courts, experts who also wrote about and taught their athletic arts, alongside the rising need for craftsmen to produce and manage equipment and spaces, proved a complication to the maintenance and perception of social hierarchies. The codification of systems of rules and equipment, far from simply reflecting a growing interest in athletics, was a response in part to bodies on display, and thusly created structures of supervision that consolidated control for powerful operators in homosocial networks. Sports were a central tool in literally and imaginatively
shaping the bodies of early modern men and women within intersecting systems of bodily signification, political performance, and social decorum.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP REAL COLEGIO COMPLUTENSE AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2020
16.00 Welcome, opening remarks and first panel.
Animal Sightings: Art, Hunting, and Court Culture in Early Modern Spain. Jodi Cranston, Professor, Dept. of History of Art & Architecture, Boston University.
Consuming the Nude in Sculpture Collections at the Spanish Court. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Professor of Art History, University of Vermont.
17.30 Second panel.
Mirrors and Echoes: Reassessing Sofonisba Anguissola’s Interventions in Early Modern Portraiture.
Jorge Sebastián Lozano, Assistant Professor of Art History, Universitat de València.
The Material Moves of Courtly Crafts: Goan Game Boards in the Portuguese Empire.
Kelli Wood, Assistant Professor of Renaissance Art, University of Tennessee.
Each panel will be followed by Q&A and discussion, moderated by Felipe Pereda, Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Professor of Spanish Art, Harvard University.
Organized by: Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University Universitat de València
More information: rcc.harvard.edu Location: RCC Conference Room 26 Trowbridge St. Cambridge, MA Registration: RSVP rcc@harvard.edu
'A Game That Transcends Borders' interview with Kelli Wood, pg. 34.
Ancient Greek Athletics
with Professor Gregory Nagy
Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University & Director of Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.)
22nd January 2019, 8:30 am
Introduction & Welcome
Dr. Ahmed AbuShouk
Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
Qatar University
Presentation of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
Mr. Ioannis Papaioannou
Curator, Olympic and Sports History
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
The Early History of Sport Collections at Qatar Museums
Dr. Kelli Wood
Consulting Curator, Sports History
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
Lecture and Discussion of Ancient Greek Athletics
Professor Gregory Nagy
Discussant: Dr. Irene Theodoropoulou
Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics at Qatar University
https://qm.org.qa/en/about-us/3-2-1-qatar-olympic-and-sports-museum/
positioned California as jejune within the art world,
superficial to the formidable genius emanating from
Empire City artists and as proclaimed by her equally eminent
critics. Yet since the 1950s Ed Ruscha has capitalized
on the urban contradictions and consumerist stereotypes
of Lotusland, garnering him international celebrity as an
artist synonymous with the city itself. Characteristically
Delphic, Ruscha once opined, “I’m dead serious about
being nonsensical.” His pithy vernacular paintings, photographs,
and prints have influenced pop, minimal, and
conceptual art movements worldwide, and his works
command considerable attention in the market today; In
November Ruscha’s citric Made in California litho (1971)
and liquid Ripe (1967) broke auction records selling for
$100,000 and $20 million.
Dr. Alexandra Schwartz has played the role of archivist,
historian, compiler, critic, and curator of Ruscha’s art for
over 20 years. The New Art Examiner spoke with her about
the concurrent journeys of Ruscha’s work and her writing.
(Physical copy in print, available early November)
Tragic losses of life and freedom motivated 15 artists to create works addressing the environment, the pandemic, and racism. A series of three colorful giclée prints by Marcus Maddox near the entrance offer a visual transition from a life now dominated by digital photography and screens into one possessed by objects and artworks. Straightaway however, Maddox’s Face Off (2020) boldly points outward again to sites where people have been demonstrating. In June, Maddox, a self-described fine art photographer who grew up in Tennessee, traveled to Philadelphia in solidarity with protests on the heels of the murder of George Floyd. An unknown man grips the ends of his durag as he takes a stance against injustice and brutality. With the uneasy stasis of photography, and a gaze from behind the man’s diagonally outstretched arms, Maddox’s art succinctly captures the inherent tension of protest and reorients us to the onerous political work of folks whose full personhood, bodies, and lives have been forever attacked in America. The discordance of the physical, visual, and metaphorical line leave no question. In 2020, the power of sight obligates us to stand for change. Acknowledging this is the price of entry into Red Arrow. It must become the price of entry into our social contract. Change.
in 3D exhibition software. Galleries and artists rely upon chic design and seamless functionality for websites accompanying brick-and-mortar shows and sales. Collection managers wrangle the kraken’s weighty and ever-expanding tentacles of data. Museums engage visitors through digital interactives and apps aimed at both education and entertainment. For many, the closures and isolation of the pandemic have clarified and amplified the possibilities and pitfalls that technology brings to media, old and new. For others, sights have been long set on the nexus of tech and object.
Duke University’s Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture has interrogated the potential of new computational work in the realm of the arts for over a decade. A recent partnership with Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art resulted in a fully online, interactive exhibition that was
ready to debut in September 2020 despite the museum’s physical closure in the wake of the pandemic.
“Posthumous Dialogues with F. N. Souza” celebrates the memory and continued impact of Souza’s legacy on con-temporary art in Goa and across India.
Renaissance born from tumult and built upon the aesthetics of an Italian leisure class invested in play. Giocare tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Games and gaming from the Middle Ages to the modern age) treats this play both in form and content. Francesca Aceto and Francesco Lucioli curate a collection of eleven creative essays engaging with Italian scholarship on games and play in medieval and early modern Europe in history, language, literature, and art. As the subtitle suggests, rules circumscribe both ethics and aesthetics, and the editors’ introduction portrays a ludic world evolving into one codified by regulation. The rhetoric of virtuous play too structures the dialogue of the contributors’ essays.
Taken as a whole, the essays’ interdisciplinary conversation evokes the intermedial nature of games as structures of both form and formfulness to the attentive ludologist.
An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular ‘plaything’ is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.
FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY
professional work related to leisure. Girolamo Cardano classified sport as requiring two separate abilities, “agility of body, as with a ball; or of strength, as with a discus and in wrestling,” and in the sixteenth-century exercises which emphasized agility over brute strength increasingly gained prominence as venues for the salubrious maintenance of physique and the performance of aristocratic masculine virtue during social and political conduct. A rhetorical slippage between sport and war frequently manifested itself in both artistic representations of and the performance of sport in order to ascribe the virtues of virility to aristocratic athletes. Yet the real or potential corporeal dominance of a brawny artisanal class, a “rivalry not of birth, but of strength and ability, wherein villagers are quite a match for
nobles,” in the words of Castiglione, also fundamentally influenced the regulation and representation of bodies through sport. The rising need for a professional class of athletes paid to perform on the street and as salaried
members of courts, experts who also wrote about and taught their athletic arts, alongside the rising need for craftsmen to produce and manage equipment and spaces, proved a complication to the maintenance and perception of social hierarchies. The codification of systems of rules and equipment, far from simply reflecting a growing interest in athletics, was a response in part to bodies on display, and thusly created structures of supervision that consolidated control for powerful operators in homosocial networks. Sports were a central tool in literally and imaginatively
shaping the bodies of early modern men and women within intersecting systems of bodily signification, political performance, and social decorum.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP REAL COLEGIO COMPLUTENSE AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2020
16.00 Welcome, opening remarks and first panel.
Animal Sightings: Art, Hunting, and Court Culture in Early Modern Spain. Jodi Cranston, Professor, Dept. of History of Art & Architecture, Boston University.
Consuming the Nude in Sculpture Collections at the Spanish Court. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Professor of Art History, University of Vermont.
17.30 Second panel.
Mirrors and Echoes: Reassessing Sofonisba Anguissola’s Interventions in Early Modern Portraiture.
Jorge Sebastián Lozano, Assistant Professor of Art History, Universitat de València.
The Material Moves of Courtly Crafts: Goan Game Boards in the Portuguese Empire.
Kelli Wood, Assistant Professor of Renaissance Art, University of Tennessee.
Each panel will be followed by Q&A and discussion, moderated by Felipe Pereda, Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Professor of Spanish Art, Harvard University.
Organized by: Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University Universitat de València
More information: rcc.harvard.edu Location: RCC Conference Room 26 Trowbridge St. Cambridge, MA Registration: RSVP rcc@harvard.edu
'A Game That Transcends Borders' interview with Kelli Wood, pg. 34.
Ancient Greek Athletics
with Professor Gregory Nagy
Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University & Director of Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.)
22nd January 2019, 8:30 am
Introduction & Welcome
Dr. Ahmed AbuShouk
Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
Qatar University
Presentation of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
Mr. Ioannis Papaioannou
Curator, Olympic and Sports History
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
The Early History of Sport Collections at Qatar Museums
Dr. Kelli Wood
Consulting Curator, Sports History
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum
Lecture and Discussion of Ancient Greek Athletics
Professor Gregory Nagy
Discussant: Dr. Irene Theodoropoulou
Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics at Qatar University
Panel 2: Video Game Art: Pedagogy and Research
Over the past decades video games have blossomed into one of the most prevalent forms of media in the world and remain at the forefront of not only technological, but also artistic, innovation. Universities and cultural institutions thus have the potential to play a crucial role in shaping emerging fields of pedagogy and research on video games in arts and humanities disciplines. This panel presents advances in teaching video games using digital humanities resources and methods in the fields of art, art history, and film and media studies.
Dr. Kelli Wood will open the discussion by situating video games in a longue durée history of game studies. Her paper examines the recent roles of libraries, museums, and classrooms in managing access to the intermedial state of video games as dually aesthetic and technological, and critically, how those institutions strive to achieve a prescient historical distance from the artefacts of video games that are ultimately enmeshed in an archeology of knowledge dictated by our own discourses. Chaz Evans, lecturer at Northwestern University, will turn the discussion toward studio-based approaches to game-making that decentralize the role of programmer in order to question agency in traditional design models of video game art. His talk will demonstrate how programming can be taught as one node in a non-hierarchical network of fundamental competencies in instruction, incorporating a creative code approach that opens programming to critical and creative thinking styles that push the boundaries of traditional computer science classrooms. To conclude, Dr. Tiffany Funk brings together concerns of both history and game making from the first two papers by discussing a pedagogical approach based largely on teaching cultural studies and social practice through both video game history and production. Her paper will focus on video games as a unique, innovative technology with the power to transform consumers into performers, designers, and artists through archiving, appropriating, remixing, and recirculating media content.
Wednesday, Nov. 7th, 2018
Time: 5 - 6 P M
Location: Merchants and Planters Bank Auditorium at Comer Hall
Sponsored by:
Art Department
Martha Allen Lecture Series
Games Studies and Design
University of Montevallo Concert & Lecture Series
Watch the talk here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVEfhFcW2E