Beth Wilson Norwood
PhD Candidate
Art History
Title of Dissertation : Narrative Ceramics and Networks of Practice: West Mexican Visual Traditions in the Late Formative-Early Classic Periods
Beth Wilson Norwood is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of New Mexico specializing in the art of the ancient Americas, West Mexico in particular. Beth’s dissertation, “Narrative Ceramics and Networks of Practice: West Mexican Visual Traditions in the Late Formative-Early Classic Periods,” will focus on the ceramic sculpture from the Late Formative and Early Classic Periods in West Mexico. Her research focuses on the issue of visual communication, and the role West Mexican ceramic sculpture may have played in the expression of important cultural narratives and histories, as well as their use in performance and oral storytelling. By addressing the artistic corpus as an expression of a widely known set of social practices, she frames West Mexico as several communities linked through a network of practice in order to articulate the ways in which this long-lived, widely distributed visual system operated on multiple social and ideological levels.
