Artist and Art Historian, formerly Open University, England
Paul Wood studied at Barnsley School of Art in Yorkshire, Newport College of Art in South Wales, and the Royal College of Art in London. During the 1970s and 80s he was active as an artist and writer in the Conceptual Art movement, associated with the tradition of the Art & Language group, working in South Wales, the English Midlands, and Scotland. In the late 1980s he returned to England and began to work in the Art History department of the Open University. He has written on art education, on the revolutionary avant-gardes, on the theory and history of modernism, and on conceptual art. More recently he has turned to questions associated with the globalization of art, and critical debates around the idea of a world art history. His books include The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (1999), Conceptual Art (2002), and the three-volume series of Art in Theory anthologies edited with Charles Harrison and Jason Gaiger (1992-2003). Between 2000 and 2014 he was Chair of the Open University course Art of the Twentieth Century and contributing author and editor of the four books published to accompany it. In 2013 he published Western Art and the Wider World, and in 2021, a fourth volume of Art in Theory (edited with Leon Wainwright), titled The West in the World. These books address the influence of ideas about the art and visual culture of non-western societies on the western tradition, from the Renaissance and the Academy through to Modernism and contemporary globalization.
