Ella Nowicki

Ella Nowicki studies the art and material culture of the United States. Her work attends to artistic communities outside professionalized art worlds, including amateur and self-taught artists. She is interested in art as labor and leisure, humor in sculpture, midwestern art histories, and the relationship between craft and media history. As a member of the first cohort of the MA/Arts of the Americas program at the University of Arkansas, she studied whittling.

Before Yale, she was the inaugural Windgate Curatorial Fellow at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she collaborated on the exhibition America 250: Common Threads and worked to connect the museum’s studio craft collection to histories of vernacular craft. Originally from Wisconsin, she holds a BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge with an undergraduate thesis on New Deal prison murals and the visual politics of incarceration.