Lily Woodruff

Biography

Lily Woodruff received a dual Ph.D. in Art History from Northwestern University and in Histoire et Civilisation from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), both in 2012. Her research examines contemporary art with specific focuses on art and ecology, social and institutional critique, technology, participation.

Her first book, Disordering the Establishment: Participatory Art and Institutional Critique in France, 1958-1981 looks at the ways that artists developed democratizing strategies such as audience participation and institutional critique during the rise of technocracy under the Fifth Republic. It investigates the social and political artworld discourses that prefigure the mass protest movements of 1968, and demonstrates how the ideals of self-management and social integration impacted artists in the years following. Specifically, it examines the kinetic and op art of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joël Stein, and Yvaral), the early guerrilla posters of Daniel Buren, André Cadere’s exhibitions at other artists’ gallery openings, and the social practice of the Collectif d’Art Sociologique (Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thénot). Research for this book was supported by grants and fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Chateaubriand, and the Jeanne Marandon, and MSU’s Humanities and Arts Research and Production program.

Woodruff’s current work examines new ecological models of history and aesthetics that have appeared in recent artworks that take up methodologies of institutional critique and archival research on the subject of the Anthropocene.

Woodruff serves as President of the European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum (EPCAF), and as caa.reviews editor for exhibitions in the Midwest. At MSU, she is a regular contributor to the Film Collective and the Broad Underground Film Series. 

Teaching interests include modern and contemporary global art history and visual culture, Marxist aesthetic theory, political theory, trans-Atlantic artistic exchange, gender and sexuality, social practice, art and sociology, and photography.