Kay Wells

Education

• PhD, History of Art, University of Southern California
• MA, History of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• BA, History of Art, Barnard College, Columbia University

Office Hours

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Teaching Schedule

Courses Taught

• ARTHIST 102 - Renaissance to Modern Art and Architecture
• ARTHIST 250 - Introduction to American Art
• ARTHIST 353 - American Art: Colonial Period-1870
• ARTHIST 354 - American Art: 1870 - Present
• ARTHIST 355 - American Folk Art
• ARTHIST 356 - American Architecture
• ARTHIST 368 - History of Modern Design
• ARTHIST 462 - Frank Lloyd Wright
• ARTHIST 501 - Colloquium in Method and Theory
• ARTHIST 750 - Revival! Visualizing the American Past
• ARTHIST 750 - Japonisme—Japan and America in Artistic Encounter

Teaching Interests

Prof. Wells teaches courses on the art and architecture of the United States, with a special focus on decorative arts and crafts, folk art, and modern design. 

Research Interests

Prof. Wells's research focuses on the politics of decorative arts and design in the United States. Her newest book, Uncanny Revivals: Designing an American Identity (Yale University Press, 2026) examines the uncanny aesthetics and White nationalist politics of colonial revival design during the 1930s and 1940s. The first book-length consideration of colonial revivalism in relation to race, Uncanny Revivals does not merely critique colonial revival design for promoting White nationalist politics but examines what made these designs so ideologically effective and aesthetically popular during era of intense political polarization and economic uncertainty. In considering the politics of a revivalist art movement, Uncanny Revivals builds on Wells's first book, Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York (Yale University Press, 2019), which examined the revival of French tapestry as a medium for modern art after World War II. Wells revealed how modernists used tapestry to expand the audience, critical importance, function, and marketability of modern art in order to establish abstraction as the dominant aesthetic of American Cold War capitalism. Weaving Modernism argued that while tapestry helped modern art reach new heights, the medium also contests many of our conventional narratives about “high” modernism in postwar New York by showing how Americans engaged with the French identity, decorative function, and reproductive abilities of modern art. Wells's current research project examines how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century landscape designers used the concept of the Italian garden to establish the legitimacy of their emerging profession. Taking an ecocritical approach, Wells compares Italian gardens in dramatically different climates across the United States to show how American landscape designers used them to emphasize the timelessness and architectural rigor of their craft. 

Selected Publications