About
Chassidy Winestock is a historian of modern and contemporary art currently completing her PhD in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation centers on the work of Mildred Thompson, Howardena Pindell, Maren Hassinger, and Liliana Porter from the 1960s and 1970s. She explores how the work engages in embodied abstraction through the materialized line in contravention of narratives around the universal. In 2024, Chassidy curated the exhibition, A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The exhibition takes its name from a 1977 work by Thompson in which the images are "unquestionably both natural landscape and human-scape," as Chassidy notes in the catalog's essay. While serving as a graduate student intern in the Modern and Contemporary Art Division of the Harvard Art Museums, she worked on the exhibition, Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art. Chassidy has also written essays on the work of Elizabeth Catlett, Lorna Simpson, and LaToya Hobbs.
Chassidy earned a JD from The University of Michigan Law School and received a BA in literary studies from The University of Texas at Dallas. She has worked as an attorney and an educator in Atlanta and taught courses at Harvard.
"[The artist] made a point of juxtaposing image and object, the representative and the real, calling into question the stability of the surface by conflating these paradigms and - importantly - literally piercing, cutting, and folding the surface." Exh. cat. A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture (2024)
Curating
Inaugural Visiting Curator, July 2022 - February 2024, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA
Curated exhibition A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, February 5, 2024 - June 22, 2024, focused on early artworks of Mildred Thompson, Howardena Pindell, Maren Hassinger, and Liliana Porter
Curatorial Project, August 2021 - September 2021, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Conducted research and drafted text on artwork by Howardena Pindell for exhibition Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, March 4, 2022 - July 31, 2022, Special Exhibitions Gallery
Curatorial Project, May 2021 - August 2021, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Conducted research and drafted texts on artworks by Leonard Baskin, Bessie Harvey, Michael Rothloff, and David Smith for long-term exhibition in Modern and Contemporary Art, New Images gallery, part of the museum’s Reframe initiative
Graduate Student Intern, September 2018 - May 2019, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Conducted research, drafted texts, and proposed programming for exhibition Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art, September 6, 2019 - January 5, 2020; conducted research and drafted text for exhibition featuring Kara Walker’s U.S.A. Idioms, February 25, 2019 - October 8, 2019
Writing
"Coda: On Line," in Elizabeth Rudy, ed., LaToya M. Hobbs: Carving Out Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025.
Chassidy Winestock, A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, exh. cat. Cambridge: Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 2024.
"Considering Representation: On Elizabeth Catlett’s Portrait of a Woman." Index, Special Issue, June 17, 2021. https://harvardartmuseums.org/article/celebrating-juneteenth-the-power-of-portraits
"Chassidy Winestock on Lorna Simpson." Vision and Justice: The Art of Citizenship, digital publication, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, August 27, 2016 - January 8, 2017.
https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/vision-and-justice/slide/9210
Talks
"Black Women and Postminimalism," Session Co-Chair with Patricia Ekpo, College Art Association Annual Conference, February 19, 2026
"Building Forms[,] Playing Them Against Shadows: Mildred Thompson's Wood Pictures and Early Paintings," College Art Association Annual Conference, February 19, 2026
"Length, Breadth, and Depth: The Three-Dimensional Object in the 1960s and 1970s," Contemporary Art Study Group, Atlanta, GA, November 17, 2025
"Gallery Talk: LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time," May 1, 2024, Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Gallery Tour: A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, May 1, 2024, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA, curator tour with graduate student teachers
"Memory/Care/Work: Chassidy A. Winestock in Conversation with Melissa Messina and Holly Smith," April 16, 2024, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA
Gallery Tour: A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, February 28, 2024, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA, curator tour with Curating Contemporary Art seminar, taught by Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
"Maren Hassinger in Conversation with Chassidy A. Winestock: On the Occasion of A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture," March 7, 2024, Knafel Center, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA
Exhibitions Tour: In Their Own Voices and A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture, February 6, 2024, Lia and William Poorvu Gallery, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA
"A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture Opening Program: Curator Talk with Chassidy A. Winestock,” February 5, 2024, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA
"Howardena Pindell," March 30, 2022, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, invited talk with Artisanal Modernisms and the Labor of Women seminar, taught by Professor Maria Gough
"(Re)Define the Landscape: Howardena Pindell, Kara Walker, and Kerry James Marshall," March 10, 2021, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, in conversation with Mary Schneider Enriquez, Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, later included in the video series, Reframe at the Harvard Art Museums, and the series, Lectures at the Harvard Art Museums
Fellows Tour: Willie Cole: Beauties, May 20, 2019, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Member Tour: Kara Walker’s U.S.A. Idioms (2017), Jackson Pollock’s No. 2 (1950), and Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (2008), May 15, 2019, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
"Gallery Talk: Kara Walker’s U.S.A. Idioms (2017)," April 24, 2019 and May 14, 2019, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
"Trompe L’œil in Liliana Porter’s Hook," December 8, 2016, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, talk delivered for This is a Real Symposium on Art, Aesthetics, and Deception