Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Author Talk with Kristina Wilson

In this Preservation Book Club webinar, Art Historian and Author Kristina Wilson joined us to speak about her book Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design. A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, this book unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture. Following Kristina's presentation, she was joined in conversation by Sarah Tietje-Mietz, Digital Editor at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

Kristina Wilson is Professor of Art History at Clark University in Worcester, MA. She is the author of Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design (Princeton University Press 2021); as well as The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition (2009), which won the Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art; and Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (2004), which won the Charles Montgomery Book Award from the Decorative Arts Society.

Her current research interests include the role of race in design consumption and production, and the intersections of race and abstraction in mid-twentieth-century painting and sculpture. During the summer of 2019, she was a George Gurney Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where she conducted research in the papers of several African American artists who were profiled in Ebony magazine in the 1950s.

Sarah Tietje-Mietz is a passionate preservationist, storyteller, artist, and historian. She was formerly the director of Dorothy Riester’s Hilltop House and Studio, a Mid-Century artist-built home in Cazenovia, NY. She is currently the Digital Content Editor at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In this role, Sarah helps tell the story of this important site of craft and creativity.

Her writing has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, CNY Magazine, Syracuse Woman Magazine, Syracuse.com, The Stand, The Post and Courier, Cape Cod LIFE and HOME, and on the blogs of Docomomo-NY/Tristate and The Preservation League of NYS. Sarah is a practicing artist, exhibiting in the New York and New England region.

Preservation Book Club events are sponsored by the Peggy N. & Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust.