Kathy O’Dell

Image of Kathy O’Dell

Maryland, USA

Kathy O’Dell is Associate Professor of Visual Arts, and Special Assistant to the Dean for Education and Arts Partnerships, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she teaches art history and writing by and about artists, and focuses her research on performance art, issues of violence, and the importance of the esoteric. Her work has been published in Art in America, Artforum, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Women & Performance, among other publications. She is also the co-founder of Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts in Baltimore and the World, a series of 10 book-length journals, published between 1995 and 2005. Author of the book Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press), she is currently working on a manuscript titled The Dot: A Small History of a Big Point. In the curatorial arena, Dr. O’Dell organized the first retrospective of the artwork of feminist writer Kate Millett in 1997, and in 2017 curated Gun Show, an exhibition of 112 facsimile assault rifles, which Baltimore-based sculptor David Hess fabricated from found objects ranging from broken crutches to Barbie bike seats, for purposes of generating discussion of one of today’s most volatile issues. Both exhibitions originated at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, then traveled. Dr. O’Dell sits on the Boards of Maryland Art Place (MAP) and the Baltimore County Arts Guild, and she is Co-Chair of the Maryland Public Art Commission.