Kristina Wilson, Ph.D.

Dr. Wilson received a B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993 and 2001, respectively. She joined the Clark faculty in the autumn of 2004.

Current Research and Teaching

Dr. Wilson's interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting and sculpture, modern design and architecture, and the history and methodologies of art history. Her scholarly research has focused on American painting and photography in the interwar years, the birth of modernist design in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, and the history and criticism of museums. She is particularly interested in the roles museums have played in defining modern art, and in teaching modern art from a multi-disciplinary point of view.

Dr. Wilson teaches lecture courses on nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century art, as well as an upper-level course on modern design (Arth 243: Design in the 20th Century: Arts and Crafts to Ikea). She also teaches seminars on gender in art, art and culture in twentieth-century America, and art history methods (Arth 150, required for the art history major).

In 2004, Dr. Wilson published a book on the rise of American modernist design in the Depression years, entitled Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (Yale University Press, 2004). The book won the Charles F. Montgomery Book Award from the Decorative Arts Society, and was accompanied by an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2004-2005. She is currently completing a book-length study on the role played by museums in popularizing American modern art in the late 1920s and early 1930s, entitled The Modern Eye: Looking at American Modernism, 1925-1935. She has published articles and reviews in a variety of publications, including The Art Bulletin, Studies in the Decorative Arts, Winterthur Portfolio, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Selected Publications

“The Avant-Garde and the Conservative in Lighting Design: The Modernism of Walter W. Kantack,” and Guest Editor’s Introduction, for Special Issue on American Modernism, Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 2007): 117-144; 2-5.

“‘One Big Picture’: A New View of Modern Art at the 1926 Brooklyn Exhibition,” in The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Jennifer Gross (Yale University Press, 2006), 75-95.

Review of Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living, at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 3 (September 2005): 362-64.