Biography

Kelli Wood is the Dale G. Cleaver Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee. Her scholarship on the visual and material culture of games and sports and the relationship between art, play, and mimesis in early modernity formed during her doctoral work at the University of Chicago and postdoctoral work in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Wood’s research has been published in Art History, Renaissance Studies, ArLis, and in edited volumes and her monograph The Art of Play in Early Modern Italy is under contract with Amsterdam University Press. Wood curated a permanent gallery, A Global History of Sport, of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum which opened in 2022 for the FIFA World Cup. Her new scholarly projects turn toward early modern Goa, India based on her research as Fulbright U.S. Scholar to India in 2022-2023.

Project Summary

This project considers artisanal knowledge and craft production in early modern Goa as a cultural heritage seated within a complex nexus of not only sea routes and ocean waters, but also roads, rivers, and paths connecting the Konkan coastline with the Indian subcontinent’s interior. By examining not only the finished products, but especially the ecological locales, materials, and labor conditions which underpinned the creation of crafts and artworks in Goa, a picture emerges of economic, guild, and travel practices of artisans continuing from the pre-Portuguese period in not only Goa, but also in the Deccan interior, which influenced the artistic production that boomed after increased contact with Europe beginning in the 16th century. Longstanding systems of trade facilitated the movement of materials from diverse ecological and mineralogical domains alongside specialized skills and styles of artisans working across a range of media. Craft in Goa relied upon the artisanal epistemology of makers colliding with a host of new Portuguese and Italian Jesuits, apothecaries, and merchants in their lands. This global Goa engendered a cosmopolitan corpus of artworks created through dynamics of negotiation, circulation, reception, and resistance on the part of the region’s residents. The itinerate nature of artisanal work before and beyond the sphere of European influence denaturalizes a history of luxury objects for export and provides a distinctly Goan vantage point to approach the complex signification of its crafts in a local context.