Lara Kuykendall
Director of the School of Art and Associate Professor of Art History
Lara Kuykendall earned a BA in art history and government from the University of Virginia, an MA in modern art history at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in American art history from the University of Kansas. She was a Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Scholar in Santa Fe, NM in 2010. Dr. Kuykendall’s current research explores issues of national identity, heroism, and humor in American visual culture. She is currently preparing articles on Florine Stettheimer’s Dada patriotism during World War II and Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas’s 1931 painting of Harriet Tubman. She has written for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and the innovative online art history textbook, Smarthistory, as well.
Dr. Kuykendall teaches courses on American art, the history of photography, museum studies, art criticism and theory, and art historical methodologies. With Jacinda Russell, she developed a course called Space, Land, and Concept in Art of the American West, which culminates in a two-week sojourn to visit Native American sites like Acoma Pueblo, the landscapes that inspired the Taos Society of Artists and Georgia O’Keeffe; earthworks by Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria; Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX; and beyond.
Recent Publications
Kuykendall, Lara. “John Steuart Curry: Regionalism at War.” In Rediscovering the American Midwest: Volume 2, The American Midwest in a Scattering Time: How Modernism Met Midwestern Culture, edited by Sara Kosiba, 207-226. Hastings College Press, 2018.
Kuykendall, Lara. “Palmer Hayden’s John Henry Series: Inventing an American Hero.” In Locating American Art: Finding Art's Meaning in Museums, Colonial Period to the Present, edited by Cynthia Fowler, 167-182. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2016.
Parker, Kyle, Denise Jones, and Lara Kuykendall. “App Development as a Learning Tool: Students Participate for a Win-Win Learning Opportunity.” ACUTA Journal (The Association for College and University Technology Advancement) 19, no. 4 (Winter 2015-2016): 16-18.
Kuykendall, Lara. “John Steuart Curry’s Our Good Earth and Associated American Artists.” In Art for Every Home: Associated American Artists, 1934-2000, edited by Elizabeth Seaton and Jane Myers, 126-129. Manhattan, KS: Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2015.