Alumna Dr. Lesley Wolff Joins Faculty at Texas Tech University School of Art

This Fall, Dr. Lesley Wolff (PhD ’18) joins the faculty at Texas Tech University as tenure-track Assistant Professor in Art History, specializing in Latinx and Latin American art and critical theory. Wolff is thrilled to be part of TTU’s School of Art, which offers degrees in art history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She looks forward to contributing to the vibrant interdisciplinary community of TTU, where she can put her doctoral studies in the visual cultures of the Americas and foodways into action in the classroom as well as in collaboration with artists, art historians, and curators in West Texas. Wolff is already working to bring dynamic arts programming to the TTU campus next year in conjunction with the University’s Comparative Literature Symposium on Indigeneity. Thanks to the generous support of TTU’s School of Art, Wolff will begin field research this winter in Guadalajara, Mexico, for a forthcoming article on the Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos.

In addition to her new position at TTU, Wolff is also the recipient of two competitive awards for 2019-2020 to support the completion of her book manuscript on the visuality of foodways in post-revolutionary Mexico. Wolff has been named a Tyson Scholar of American Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where she will be in residence at the museum in April and May of 2020. Wolff will then spend June and July of 2020 in residence at the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas, Austin, where she holds a Research Fellowship in the Humanities, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment. She looks forward to researching Crystal Bridges’ vast collection of twentieth-century food related art as well as the special collections of 20th century Mexican art and culture at the Harry Ransom Center and incorporating these new findings into her book manuscript.

Lesley Wolff with Edouard Duval-Carrié at the 2018 opening of the Decolonizing Refinement exhibition at the FSU Museum of Fine Arts

Wolff’s curatorial and museum work in Florida also continues into this year. She is the program organizer and moderator for the event Picturing the Body Politic: The Arts of Latin America, which will take place on November 8th and 9th at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. The program will feature presentations and discussions from artists and scholars Edward J. Sullivan, Anna Indych-López, C. Ondine Chavoya, María Martínez-Cañas and FSU PhD Candidate Gabriela Germaná. The program will be free and open to the public and Wolff encourages FSU faculty and students to attend the event. Wolff is also the curator of the forthcoming contemporary art exhibition The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined, which emerged out of the FSU exhibition Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié (MoFA 2018, co-curated by Wolff in collaboration with Dr. Paul Niell and Dr. Michael Carrasco). The new exhibition will open at Miami’s Little Haiti Cultural Center this fall with travel to multiple venues across the US in 2020 and 2021. Wolff looks forward to an exciting year of teaching, research, writing and curating–all of which began in earnest during her time at FSU.