Curated Conversations

Zeus, Diana, and Bacchus star in this exploration of scandalous shenanigans and sinister seductions in the Blanton European Art Collection. Join Chrissy Zappella, Blanton Fellow of European Art, Painting and Sculpture, and Dr. Kelli Wood, Assistant Professor of Renaissance Art at the University of Tennessee, to discuss godly fun and games through paintings in the Blanton European art collection.

**This conversation will contain adult themes.

Mix up something heavenly to sip during the event with our cocktail/mocktail suggestion!

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About our Speakers

Chrissy Zappella is the inaugural Blanton Fellow of European Painting and Sculpture at the Blanton Museum of Art. She has also held curatorial fellowships and internships at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frick Collection, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Chrissy is currently finishing her doctorate in Art History at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in sixteenth-century Florentine painting. Chrissy has also earned MAs in Art History from both the University of Chicago and CUNY Hunter College, as well as an MS in Teaching from Pace University. Her first article, “The Implicating Gaze in Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus,” is forthcoming in Studies in Iconography this Spring.

Dr. Kelli Wood is Assistant Professor of Renaissance Art at the University of Tennessee and a Consulting Curator for Qatar Museums. Her recent publications include “Display Mode: Exhibiting Video Games as Art, History” in the New Art Examiner, “Chancing it: print, play, and gambling games at the end of the sixteenth century” in Art History, and “Balls on walls, feet on streets: Subversive Play in Grand Ducal Florence” in Renaissance Studies. This work was generously supported by her alma mater the University of Chicago (PhD, 2016), a Fulbright at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and a three-year postdoc in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Her first book, The Art of Play in Early Modern Italy is under contract with Amsterdam University Press in their series Cultures of Play: 1300-1700. Currently Wood is curating a permanent wing of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, A Global History of Sport, forthcoming in anticipation of the 2022 World Cup.’