American Art

American Art The Library of Prof. Patricia Hills Professor Emerita, American Art & African American Art, Boston University with important completions from The Library of Prof. Jules David Prown Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus, History of Art American Art and Material Culture, Yale University 3927 titles in over 4050 volumes American Art: The Library of Prof. Patricia Hills, with important completions from The Library of Prof. Jules David Prown. Patricia Hills, Professor Emerita of Boston University, is a nationally recognized specialist in American art and African-American art. She is the author of numerous studies on nineteenth- and twentieth century American art and artists, from the development of the early Western frontier to the gender politics of contemporary society. She received the Distinguished Teaching of Art History award from the College Art Association in 2011. Her library comprises more than 3,800 titles providing a substantial basis for the study of American art of all periods, and is especially strong on the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, African-American art, as well as modern and contemporary art. The addition of books from the Prown Library bolsters coverage of major figures and movements of American art, particularly of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, from early colonial portraiture, the Hudson River School, academic art, and American Impressionism, up to the advent of Modernism, together with selected works on postwar and contemporary art. Jules David Prown is Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Yale University, where he was the founding Director of the Yale Center for British Art, and Curator of American Art at Yale University Art Gallery. One of the most admired senior scholars of American art, Professor Prown received the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association of America in 1995, among numerous other honors. His publications include the catalogue raisonné "John Singleton Copley (Harvard University Press, 1966), "American Painting from Its Beginnings to the Armory Show" (Skira, 1969), and "Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture" (Yale University Press, 2002). COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION Awards 2011 DISTINGUISHED TEACHING OF ART HISTORY AWARD Patricia Hills, Boston University Patricia Hills (photograph by Michael Hamilton) An active, gifted teacher, faithful mentor, and valued colleague, Patricia Hills has maintained a prodigious career, producing scholarship that has profoundly shaped the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture, and African American art in particular. Her textbook Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the Twentieth Century (2001) has become standard reading in the field, and her books and articles on Jacob Lawrence, May Stevens, Alice Neel, Stuart Davis, John Singer Sargent, Romare Bearden, and Eastman Johnson are highly esteemed by many. As professor of art history at Boston University, she is a creative, active, and engaged classroom leader who has developed an innovative style of teaching that emphasizes intellectual role-playing and demonstrates striking methodological openness. Hills’s admirable commitment to the time-demanding aspects of pedagogy, such as her rigorous attention to student writing, and her ability to combine that investment with a remarkable publication record, are a model for students and teachers across the discipline. As repeatedly express in her many letters of support, Hills is an inspiration to generations of art historians past, present, and future. She accomplishes this through passionate care and attention, working closely with current students while maintaining contact many former ones whose careers she continuously helps to advance. Boston University’s Graduate Student Art History Association has twice recognized her, in 1998 and 2005, for “outstanding commitment and ongoing support to the intellectual and social life of the graduate community.” Hills’s leadership as an administrator has benefited them tremendously, thanks to her success in locating external funding for teaching and curatorial fellowships, dissertation research grants, conference travel stipends, and summer research grants through a stable, consistent program of alumni giving. Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (2009) Hills earned a BA from Stanford University in 1957, an MA from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1968, and a PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1973. She has taught at Boston University since 1978, where she also served as director of the Boston University Art Gallery (1980–89) and director of the program in museum studies (1980–91). The recipient of many distinguished grants and fellowships, including those from Harvard University’s W. E .B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York, Hills has organized numerous highly praised exhibitions—including Eastman Johnson: Painting America at the Brooklyn Museum (with Teresa A. Carbone, 1999–2000) and John Singer Sargent at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago (1986–87)—that have advanced the field of modern American art. Her most recent publication, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (2009), surveys the artist’s entire career through archival research, social and cultural history, interviews with artists, and close examinations of the works. Jury: Aimée Bessire, Maine College of Art, chair; Laurinda Dixon, Syracuse University; and Glenn Peers, University of Texas at Austin. Boston University Patricia Hills – Emeritus Professor Emerita, American Art and African American Art B.A., Stanford University; M.A., City University of New York, Hunter College; Ph.D., New York University Professor Hills taught courses on American art and visual culture, and is a specialist in the history of American painting, African American art, and art and politics. Major books and catalogues for exhibitions she organized include: Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (2010), Syncopated Rhythms: 20 th -Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection (coauthored, 2005), May Stevens (2005), Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20 th Century (2001), Eastman Johnson: Painting America (co-authored, 1999), Stuart Davis (1996), John Singer Sargent (1986), Alice Neel (1983), Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s (1983), The Figurative Tradition and The Whitney Museum of American Art: Paintings and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection (co-authored, 1980), Turn-of-the-Century America: Paintings, Graphics, Photographs , 1890-1910 (1977), The Painters’ America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910 (1974), The American Frontier: Images and Myths (1973), Eastman Johnson (1972). She has also contributed essays to catalogues of major exhibitions, such as Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (2000), Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (1993), Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack, a Retrospective 1950- 1990 (1992), The West as America (1991), Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (1990). Her articles have appeared in American Art, Oxford Art Journal, Prospects, Archives of American Art Journal, Dictionary of Women Artist, The Encyclopedia of New York City, American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts Vol. 2, Romare Bearden, American Modernist (2011), Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda and the Cold War (2010), Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism (2007), The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (2006), Looking High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (2006), Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850 (1998), Redefining American History Painting (1995). Eastman Johnson: Painting America (1999), co-curated with Brooklyn Museum of Art curator Teresa A. Carbone, won the Henry Allen Moe Prize for most outstanding exhibition catalogue in the State of New York for the year 1999. She has held both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and has been a fellow at the Charles Warren Center and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, both of Harvard University, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In February 2011 she received the “Distinguished Teaching of Art History” award from the College Art Association. In May 2011 she and co-author Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz received the William Fischelis Book Award presented by the Victorian Society in America for John S. Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women , ed. by Paul S. D’Ambrosio (Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2010). In 2011, Professor Hills received the Distinguished Teaching of Art History award from the College Art Association. Related News & Events More than one hundred friends, students, alumni, and faculty gathered to honor Professor Patricia Hills at a symposium held at the George Sherman Union on April 26, 2014. Entitled “American Visual Culture in Context: A Symposium in Honor of Professor Patricia Hills,” this event featured academic papers by prominent scholars from across the country who were Hills’ former students. Sponsored by the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, alumni and current students, the Boston University Center for the Humanities,

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