Art and Art History

Dr. David S. Efurd

Associate Professor of Art History

B.F.A., Cornell University
M.A., University of Georgia
Ph.D., Ohio State University

Dr. Efurd teaches courses on Asian art and Islamic art. He holds a B.F.A. degree from Cornell University, an M.A. in art history from the University of Georgia, and a Ph.D. in history of art from the Ohio State University. With South Asia as his field of specialty, Efurd studies early Buddhist monasteries carved directly into the stone cliffs of western India. His research encompasses the interaction of peoples in the ancient western Deccan and the resulting artistic and architectural forms hewn from the living rock. A recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Award, Efurd has lived in India and traveled to many of the archaeological sites he teaches in his classes. His training in the arts informs his understanding of both ancient and contemporary artistic techniques.

Dr. Karen Goodchild

Chapman Family Professor of Humanities (Art History) and Chair

B.A., University of Georgia
M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia

Karen Hope Goodchild is Chapman Professor and Chair of Art and Art History at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She has recently published articles on landscape theory, Giorgio Vasari, Piero di Cosimo, and Agnolo Bronzino, and her research has appeared in scholarly journals including Artibus et Historiae and Source, as well as in the Ashgate Research Companion to Giorgio Vasari (2016). She co-edited the volume Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), which includes her essay “Naturalism and Antiquity, Redefined, in Vasari’s Verzure.” Her current work intersects with landscape and art theory, artist biography, literature, and gender. Goodchild teaches courses in Ancient and Classical art, Renaissance art, Gender in the Early Modern Period, surveys of African Art and pre-modern western art, and practice-based courses involving community engagement in the arts.

Dr. Peter Schmunk

Mr. and Mrs. T. R. Garrison Professor of the Humanities (Art History)

B.Mus., University of Washington
M.Mus., Ph.D., Ohio University

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Professor Peter Schmunk holds B.A. and B.Mus. degrees from the University of Washington and the M.Mus. and Ph.D. in comparative arts from Ohio University. Now In his fourth decade as a professor of art history at Wofford, he teaches courses on nineteenth-century, Baroque, and Medieval art, on the history of architecture, and on art historiography. His interdisciplinary research on the influence of musical culture on nineteenth-century painting has produced articles on Van Gogh, Corot, Whistler, and Redon, and a book, The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century. He was recently a keynote speaker in Lucca, Italy, at a conference on “Music and the Figurative Arts in the Nineteenth Century.” An avid hiker, backpacker, and cultural traveler, Professor Schmunk has an active studio practice in photography and has exhibited his work at several college galleries and at the Spartanburg Art Museum. He will present a retrospective exhibition at the Richardson Art Museum at Wofford in the spring of 2020. Schmunk has led Wofford students on twenty-two travel-study projects during the January Interim term and will do so again in January 2020 with a focus on the syncretic cultures of Portugal, southern Spain, and Morocco. His photography website may be found at cultureandlandscape.com.

Jessica Scott-Felder

Assistant Professor of Studio Art

B.A., Spelman College
M.F.A., Georgia State University

Jessica Scott-Felder is a visual and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia. She is an Assistant Professor and Studio Coordinator of Studio Art and teaches Drawing, Design, Figure Drawing, Painting, Printmaking and in the Department of Art and Art History at Wofford College located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She completed her undergraduate studies in Studio Art from Spelman College, an MFA in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking from Georgia State University and studied experimental printmaking at the Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence, Italy.

Jessica’s latest performance art piece, Adornment was featured in the group exhibition "Africa Forecast," at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta and also featured in the 2017 edition of the Emergency Index, a nationally distributed performance art catalog. She was the 2017 featured visiting artist at Ithaca College in New York where she presented her artistic research on “Black Matter”, an installation based on Black Hole physics, American folklore, Afrofuturism and imagination. Her drawings have been featured in nationally and internationally recognized spaces such as the A.I.R Gallery in New York and the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Ga. Her work is featured in private and corporate collections in Spartanburg, Cambridge, New York, New Jersey and the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta.

Michael Webster

Assistant Professor of Studio Art

B.F.A., East Carolina University
M.F.A., School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Michael Webster is an artist whose work investigates the social organization of space. The output from his work takes the form of interventions, installations, and objects, often responding to existing sites. He has completed site-specific projects in Chicago, IL, Moorestown, NJ, Greenville, NC and Talca, Chile, and has participated in residencies at Hambidge Center, Elsewhere Museum, and Penland School of Craft. Recent exhibitions include Locust Projects, Miami, Paradice Palase, Brooklyn, Wiregrass Museum of Art, AL, and the 701 Center for Contemporary Art, Columbia, SC. At Wofford, Prof. Webster teaches beginning and advanced courses in sculpture, installation art, and 3D digital fabrication.

Dr. Gillian Young

Assistant Professor of Art History

B.A. Brown University
M.A. New York University
Ph.D. Columbia University

Gillian Young is Assistant Professor of Art History at Wofford College, where she teaches art historiography and the second half of the introductory survey of Western Art, as well as specialized classes on modern and contemporary art and interdisciplinary courses in the humanities.

Dr. Young’s research focuses on the interwoven history of art and technology from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on performance. Her current book project examines the key role of the American artist Joan Jonas in the entwined emergence of video and performance art in the 1970s. This research has received support from Columbia University, the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.