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Art Historians

Campbell, Mary Schmidt

Full Name: Campbell, Mary Schmidt

Other Names:

  • Mary Schmidt Campbell
  • Mary Schmidt
  • Mary Campbell

Gender: female

Date Born: 21 October 1947

Place Born: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): administrators, art historians, directors (administrators), educators, and public administrators

Institution(s): New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Spelman College, and The Studio Museum in Harlem


Overview

Romare Bearden scholar; academic administrator and museum executive. Campbell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and attended The Philadelphia High School for Girls, where she developed an interest in the arts. She attended Swarthmore College from 1965-1969 and graduated with a B.A. in English Literature. She married George Campbell, (b.1945), a physicist, in 1968. While he served alternative military service in Zambia, having obtained conscientious objector status, Campbell taught English Literature at Nkumbi University (HistoryMakers). Moving to Syracuse, New York in 1972, she obtained her M.A. in Art History on the subject of Romare Bearden’s role as an American artist in 1973 from Syracuse University. She then enrolled in the PhD program. Campbell became the art editor at the Syracuse Times and a curator of the Everson Fine Arts Museum in 1974, where she curated an exhibit entitled “Mysteries: Women in the Art of Romare Bearden” in 1975.

Campbell was appointed executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977, recommended by Beardon himself, during a period of severe financial decline. During her ten-year tenure, she restructured the executive board of the museum and moved the location of the museum to its permanent building on 144 West 125th Street by obtaining a building donation from the New York Bank for Savings in 1979, which allowed her to obtain a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and spurred the Ford Foundation to invest in the museum. The revitalization of the location attracted private donors, and the new museum space opened in 1982.

She completed a M.Phil from Syracuse University in 1981, followed by Ph.D. with a thesis also on Bearden, Romare Bearden: A Creative Mythology, in 1982, supervised by Picasso scholar Ellen C. Oppler. She was later honored in 1986 as Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. By the end of her tenure, she had increased the museum’s yearly budget to $2 million dollars annually, and the museum achieved accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums in 1987, becoming the first black-fine arts museum to gain this recognition.

In 1987, she was invited to serve as the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs of New York City by Mayor Ed Koch (1924-2013), overseeing the $172 million dollar budget for various cultural institutions across New York City. Focusing on encouraging attendance and racial integration at cultural events, she fundraised and initiated the campaign “New York and the Arts: A Cultural Affair,” which widely publicized these experiences at high-traffic areas in New York City. She instituted a cultural enrichment program to introduce the arts to unhoused and low-income youth in Queens, New York by collaborating with several arts institutions across New York City. In 1989, Koch’s successor, David Dinkins (1927-2020), reappointed Campbell as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, and she continued to expand her educational initiative into the other boroughs of New York City. In 1990, Campbell was named chairwoman of a panel to exhibit African Americans’ art on the Washington DC Mall, which resulted in the groundwork for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Campbell accepted New York University’s invitation to work as Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts in 1991, finding the position a compromise of family privacy and policymaking, but also continued to serve on the New York City Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Culture until 2000. Campbell founded various departmental and diversification initiatives at Tisch during her 23-year-long tenure including NYU’s Department of Art and Public Policy (1999), the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (2003), the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music (2003), the MBA/MFA Graduate Film and Business program (2007); the Tisch Talent Identification Process (2008); and the NYU Game Center (2008). She also doubled the size of the school’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

While she was dean, she was also appointed to several boards and honors including fellowship to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001-), Board of Managers, Swarthmore College (1987-1999), the Board of Directors of the and the board of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2008-2020). In 2009, she was appointed vice-chair to former President Barack Obama’s President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Over the course of her tenure, the application pool to the Tisch School had become both larger and more academically selective, the diversity of faculty increased tenfold, and over three times the number of minority students were admitted before she retired in 2013.

Campbell served as president of the historically black Spelman College from 2015-2022.  Under her leadership, she built the first new academic facility for the college in 20 years, succeeded in a capital campaign fund to raise $250 million, increased the endowment fund to nearly $500 million, and expanded Spelman initiatives to interact with Atlanta Public Schools.

In 2017, she was appointed to the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers in New York City. Her book, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden, won the 2018 Hooks National Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis and was a finalist for the the 2019 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award; for this book, she was also a finalist for the 55th Georgia Author of the Year Award. She received the Medal of Distinction from the American Academy in Rome in 2021.

Campbell is currently a trustee of the Doris Duke Foundation and is on the boards of the Unity Technologies, the American Museum of Natural History, and several others.


Selected Bibliography

  • [Dissertation] Romare Bearden: A Creative Mythology. Syracuse University, 1982.
    Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams. 1987.
  • Memory and Metaphor : the Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987. New York, NY: Studio Museum in Harlem. 1991.
  • Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. 2006.
  • An American Odyssey: the Life and Work of Romare Bearden. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2018.

Sources


Archives


Contributors: Monet Shum


Citation

Monet Shum. "Campbell, Mary Schmidt." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/campbell-mary-schmidt/.


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Noted academic administrator, public official, and museum executive also known for scholarship on Romare Bearden.

Proske, Beatrice Irene Gilman

Full Name: Proske, Beatrice Irene Gilman

Other Names:

  • Bea Proske

Gender: female

Date Born: 31 October 1899

Date Died: 02 February 2002

Place Born: Thornton, Grafton, NH, USA

Place Died: Ardsley, West Chester, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Romanesque, sculpture (visual works), and Spanish (culture or style)

Career(s): curators and researchers

Institution(s): Hispanic Society of America


Overview

Curator of sculpture at the Hispanic Society of America. Proske was born on October 31st, 1899. She was raised by Milan Jeremiah Gilman, a farmer, and Alice May Hazeltine (Gilman). Though initially raised in southern New Hampshire, Proske’s father sought better schooling for his children, and moved the family to Connecticut in 1912. At Gilbert High School, Proske studied German, French, Spanish, and Latin. Subsequently, Proske pursued a B.S. in Library Sciences at Simmons College in Boston, which was conferred in spring of 1920.

Following her studies, Proske worked in various roles at The Hispanic Society of America in New York City over the course of 53 years. Proske was a Research Cataloger for two years before her promotion to Assistant Curator of Sculpture in 1922. Between 1922 and 1929, Proske often traveled with colleagues to England, Spain, Italy, and France to study, catalog, and purchase Hispanic art on behalf of her post. These travels informed much of her work, including her 525-page book, Castilian Sculpture: Gothic to Renaissance, published by the Hispanic Society of America in 1951. For her persistent effort, the Hispanic Society of America awarded her a Sculpture Medal in 1953. In addition to her time there, Proske devoted herself to Brookgreen Gardens, a botanical garden in Georgetown County, South Carolina. Proske’s 1936 publication, a catalog of the Brookgreen Gardens outdoor sculpture collection, titled Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture, first published in 1936 and revised in 1968.

Between November 1968 and November 1969, Proske held the role of Curator of the Museum for the Hispanic Society of America. Proske worked throughout her retirement, advising the Hispanic Society of America, Brookgreen Gardens, and National Sculpture Review. Proske traced the development of the Spanish architecture style in an article she wrote titled SCULPTURE: From the Romanesque to the Twentieth Century, published in 1972 in Apollo. In 1975, Proske wrote on several American women sculptures for the National Sculpture Review.

Brookgreen Gardens named Proske an Honorary Trustee in 1978, and later bestowed her an Inaugural Membership Medal in 1987. On December 4th, 1993, The National Academy of Design in New York, NY, dedicated their American Sculpture Symposium to Proske. Following Proske’s death, Louis Torres, founder of art journal Aristos, and Michelle Marder Kamhi, a co-editor, wrote that Proske “brings to her personal life the same rare mix of qualities she brings to her writing—forthrightness, wit, simplicity, warmth, a respect for tradition and scholarship, and just the right touch of elegance.”


Selected Bibliography

  • “American Women Sculptors.” National Sculpture Review 24 (2–3): 8. 1972.
  • Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture. 1936. Reprint, Brookgreen Gardens, 1968.
  • Castilian Sculpture, Gothic to Renaissance. New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1951.
  • Juan Martínez Montañés, Sevillian Sculptor. New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1967.
  • “SCULPTURE: From the Romanesque to the Twentieth Century.” Apollo: The International Magazine of Art & Antiques 95 (April): 283–91. 1972.

Sources

  • Candida Smith, Richard. The Early Years of the Hispanic Society of America. The J. Paul Getty Trust, 1995.
  • Kamhi, Michelle Marder, and Louis Torres. “Beatrice Gilman Proske (1899-2002).” Accessed February 29, 2024. https://www.aristos.org/proske.htm.
  • [transcript] “Beatrice G. Proske.” Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA.


Contributors: Zahra Hassan


Citation

Zahra Hassan. "Proske, Beatrice Irene Gilman." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/proske-beatrice-irene-gilman/.


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Curator of sculpture at the Hispanic Society of America.

Wardlaw, Alvia

Full Name: Wardlaw, Alvia Jean

Other Names:

  • Alvia J. Wardlaw

Gender: female

Date Born: 05 November 1947

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African (general, continental cultures) and African American

Career(s): art historians, curators, educators, and museum directors


Overview

Director/Curator of Texas Southern University’s Museum, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Wardlaw was born to Virginia Cage (Wardlaw) and Alvin Holmes Wardlaw (1925-2023), the latter a math scholar, and educator at TSU. Wardlaw began her early childhood in Atlanta while her father studied for a master’s degree in Mathematics at a historically black university (HBCU), Atlanta University (today Clark Atlanta University). The family relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan as her father continued to pursue graduate work in mathematics at the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, her father was contacted by his former professor at Atlanta University, Professor Joseph Pierce (1902-1969), then administrator at Texas State University for Negroes (the current TSU), to encourage him to move to Houston, Texas, to contribute as faculty for TSU.

In 1949, the family moved to Houston, part of a larger migration of black intellectuals to Texas to serve as faculty and staff at the recently expanded Texas Southern. Mr. Wardlaw became the first chairman of the mathematics department at Texas Southern and the family settled in Houston.

Wardlaw attended Wellesley College and received a BA in Art History in 1969. Shortly afterward, she pursued a master’s in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. While in New York, she met the black photographer Roy DeCarava through his wife Sherry Turner DeCarava, whom she would later feature in an exhibition. In 1972, she briefly returned to Houston to work as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), worked under Phillipe de Montebello and William Agee(1936-2023) who were MFAH directors then, and began her teaching career at TSU as an art historian in the Department of Art.

In 1974, Wardlaw became a member of the Fine Arts faculty at TSU and was named Curator of Primitive Art and Education within the same year. In the year following, she did her first exhibition on DeCarava soon after she served as coordinating curator for the exhibition African Art of the Dogon which she states served as an early expression of her interest in African Art.

While serving as faculty at MFAH, Wardlaw curated diverse exhibitions, spanning from Worcester porcelain to African Art, and arranged educational activities for the museum. Simultaneously, she taught an art history course at TSU during professor and artist John Biggers’ tenure as the art department chairman. Subsequently, Biggers invited Wardlaw to join TSU as a full-time faculty member. Motivated by her deep admiration for Biggers and her belief in the significance of working at an HBCU, she accepted the opportunity at TSU. In 1984 she began graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and received her Master of Arts degree from NYU in 1985.

After completing her Ph.D. coursework in 1986, her advisor, Linda Henderson (b. 1948), recommended Wardlaw as one of the curators for the Black Art Ancestral Legacy: The African Impact on African American Art exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. She worked with senior curators Edmund Barry Gaither (b. 1944) and Regenia Perry to frame African American contributions to American art. Wardlaw notes this exhibition as ‘one of the most important exhibitions’ she has ever worked on as it examined the connection between African American artists and their African pasts. Further, it highlighted the little distinction between the trained and untrained artists within the black aesthetic. Wardlaw took a leave from TSU for two years to follow the success and tour of the show from Richmond VA, Atlanta GA––where it was the first exhibition for the National Black Arts Festival, to Boston MA, Milwaukee WA, and Cincinnati OH. It was awarded “Best Exhibition of 1990 Black Art Ancestral Legacy” in 1990. Within the same year, she returned to Houston to continue teaching at the TSU and work on her dissertation, one that examined the early years of Biggers’ work. During this time, Peter Marizo (b. 1943), director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, wanted Wardlaw as a curator for an exhibition he was organizing on the art of Biggers. The exhibition View from the Upper Room: The Art of John Biggers took place in 1995 and soon afterward, she was appointed curator of Twentieth Century Art at the MFAH.  She continued her teaching position at TSU. She received her Ph.D. in 1996, becoming the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in art history from UT Austin.

In 2002, she curated the exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, a collection of quilts made by quilters from Alabama and became the most “highly acclaimed” exhibit in 2002. She received the “International Association of Arts Critics Award” for this exhibition in 2003. Within the same year, she authored an illustrated catalog “Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art” which included an essay of hers on the history of African American art collections. Her two exhibitions were displayed in eleven and eight other cities, respectively. The Quilts of Gee’s Bend’s success continued into 2006 and it broke attendance at major museums.

Wardlaw organized over 70 exhibitions at the Museum concurrently teaching at TSU. Her work and research have been recognized as one of the major driving forces in the field of African American art history. In 2010, she was awarded the Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award for her contributions to the field of American art, and in 2021, she was honored by the Art League Houston as the recipient of the biannual 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award in Arts Leadership. She continues working as a Director/Curator at the University Museum at TSU and brings awareness and appreciation for various arts in world culture through her curations.


Selected Bibliography

  • DeCarava, Roy. Roy Decarava : Photographs : The Museum of Fine Arts Houston September 12-October 26 1975. Houston Tex: Museum of Fine Arts.
  • John Biggers Bridges. Los Angeles Calif: California Museum of Afro-American History and Culture.
  • Black Art Ancestral Legacy : The African Impulse in African-American Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990 [exhibition catalog, Dallas Museum of Art High Museum of Art Milwaukee Art Museum and Virginia Museum of Art].
  • John Thomas Biggers, Edmund B Gaither, Alison de Lima Greene, Robert Farris Thompson, contributors. The Art of John Biggers : View from the Upper Room. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
  • and Royce, Lisa, Char Diercks. Our New Day Begun : African American Artists Entering the Millennium : An Exhibition at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum February 19-May 29 2000. Austin Tex: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, 2000..
  • Beardsley, John The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. Atlanta GA: Tinwood Books in association with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2002.
  • and Oliver, Kermit. Notes from a Child’s Odyssey: The Art of Kermit Oliver. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts Houston. 2005.
  • and Franklin, John Hope. Collecting African American Art. Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts Houston/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

 


Sources



Contributors: Doriz Concepcion


Citation

Doriz Concepcion. "Wardlaw, Alvia." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wardlaw-alvia/.


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Director/Curator of Texas Southern University’s Museum, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Perry, Regenia

Full Name: Perry, Regenia Alfreda

Date Born: 30 March 1941


Overview

African-American folk art historian; the first African-American woman to hold a doctorate in art history. Perry was born in Granville County, North Carolina, in a small hamlet named Virgilina on the border of North Carolina and Virginia. The youngest of the two children born to tobacco farmers Marie Peace and Jessie Perry, Perry grew up in poverty.  Despite the negative evaluations of her teachers, Perry was very smart and left her hometown at 16 to attend the historically black Virginia State University in Petersburg. Perry switched her major from nutrition to fine arts, citing a lifelong love of art.

In 1961, Perry received a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that allowed her to attend and graduate with a master’s in art history from Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University). Perry then went on to receive course credits towards a PH.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1966 she earned her PH.D. in art history from Case Western Reserve University, becoming the first African-American woman to do so at only 24. Her dissertation was subsequently published in 1967 under the guidance of Case art historians Edmund H. Chapman  (1906-1975), James S. Pierce, Victoria Ball (1899-2001), and Cleveland Museum of Art curator Edward B. Henning (1922-1993).

Perry taught at several colleges and universities including Howard University, however, the majority of her professional career was spent at the Virginia Commonwealth University (formerly the Richmond Professional Institute), beginning in 1967. Perry was a professor of art history here for 25 years, retiring in 1990. During her tenure at VCU, Perry took leaves to develop her collection of Black art; beyond educating, Perry’s passion lay in collecting and documenting Black art, often forgotten in traditional art scholarship. The opportunity for robust collecting came in 1969 when she received a Ford Fellowship to gather subject matter for a comprehensive book on the history of African American art while completing a postdoctoral study at Yale. Perry was among the first to dedicate her efforts solely to Black folk art, in hopes of knowing “more about the art of my own people” (Scott). Perry’s method of collection centered on the personal: she came across black folk artists through any means possible, from word of mouth, galleries, historical societies, publications, museums, and more. Her purchases began in Louisiana, then expanded to the Deep South, and finally extended across the United States, talking to artists who gave samples of their art. The bulk of her collection of art and wood carvings were purchased from the artists themselves, bought in bulk and primarily with her own money. Through her travels, Perry took care to protect Black artists, often illiterate and with little knowledge of the art world, from predatory collectors; she encouraged families to create wills and save the best pieces for future generations. At its peak, Perry’s collection included over 3,000 pieces of African American art and detailed information about African American folk art.

In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had launched the much criticized exhibition “Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968”. Widespread criticism and protest came from Black artists, namely the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, for its exclusion of works by Black artists and disregard of its Black advisors. Anxious not to repeat this error, the Met contracted Perry in 1976 to guest curate its bi-centenial “Selections of 19th Century Afro-American Art”. The show’s ninety-seven pieces from around twenty artists was the first comprehensive display of African American art at the Metropolitan Museum, and Perry noted, remained the only one for years (Richmond Free Press). Perry, who wrote the catalog, chose an unconventional piece for the cover of the catalog: Jules Lion’s pastel Portrait of Ashur Moses Nathan and Son, which depicts a white father embracing his mixed-race son.  The history and subjects of the work remain disputed (cf. Sara Piccard). Perry’s selection of the portrait iluminated the complexities of racial classification in American history and challenges the prevailing notions of what qualifies as African American art. The exhibition received praise from the press. The reviewer Henry Ghent drew parallels between Perry’s exhibition and Harlem on My Mind, praising Perry’s work in drawing attention to Black artists while chastising the Met’s lackluster effort to correct previous wrongdoings.

Perry’s writing focuses on the remarkable resilience of African Americans and their ability to create art in the horrid conditions of slavery and subjugation for hundreds of years. Her legacy is her extensive research in preserving the contributions of African American artists and Black folk art. Perry’s scholarship on James Van der Zee was recognized in 2021 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts who established the endowed Regenia A. Perry Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art.  Emory University purchased much of Perry’s collection as well as all her written documents, forming the creation of its African American archival library.


Selected Bibliography

  • Perry, Regenia A. Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilts. New York, New York : Rizzoli International, 1994.
  • Selections of 19th-century Afro-american art: An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 19-August 1, 1976. New York , New York : Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976.
  • Free within ourselves: African-American artists in the collection of the National Museum of American Art. San Francisco, California : National Museum of American Art in association with Pomegranate Artbooks, 1992.



Contributors: Selom Bediako


Citation

Selom Bediako. "Perry, Regenia." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/perryr/.


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African-American folk art historian; the first African-American woman to hold a doctorate in art history.

Fax, Elton Clay

Image Credit: Black Past

Full Name: Fax, Elton Clay

Gender: male

Date Born: 09 October 1909

Date Died: 13 May 1993

Place Born: Baltimore, Baltimore Independent City, MD, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, biography (general genre), and Black (general, race and ethnicity)

Career(s): artists (visual artists) and authors


Overview

Author of early books on black artists and New York Times illustrator. Elton Clay Fax was born to Mark Oakland Fax and Willie Estelle Fax. Fax developed a strong passion for reading, which was inspired by his mother, a school teacher.

In 1926, Fax graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore and then attended Claflin College, a historically Black college, in South Carolina. He subsequently transferred to Syracuse University receiving his BFA in 1931. As an artist, he received a gold medal in 1932 at Baltimore’s Women’s Cooperative Civic League.

Between 1935 and 1936, Fax returned to Claflin to teach art, but left for New York City to teach at the Harlem Community Art Center until 1940, part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era art program funded by the federal government. At the Center, Fax worked under sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962), who directed the Center, and alongside artists including Selma Burke and Norman Lewis.

Fax’s career roughly fell into two stages: the illustrator-cartoonist era and the author-chronicler era. The former began during his college years and slowly transitioned to the latter around the 1950s, drawing inspiration from his extensive travels. Beginning in the 1930s, prominent black artists like Romare Bearden, began writing literature as well. Fax’s illustrating followed this trend (Driskell).  In 1942 he published a comic strip Susabelle.  Journals such as Astounding Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Real Western, and All Sports printed his illustrations beginning in 1943. Fax moved to book illustration in 1944, illustrating black- and racially-integrated stories such as Dr. George Washington Carver, Scientist (1944), a biography by Shirley Graham (1896-1977) and George Lipscomb (1898-1957) and Georgene Faulkner (1873-1958)’s children’s books Melindy’s Medal (1945) and Melindy’s Happy Summer (1949).  In 1949 and 1956, Fax performed chalk talk, or live drawing, for the New York Times Children’s Book Program.

He and his family moved to Mexico between 1953. During this time, he received sponsorship from the U.S. Department of State Educational Exchange Program to travel throughout Latin America and South America, concluding in 1956. In 1959, he arrived in Rome as one of the fourteen representatives of the American Society of African Culture. He published West African Vignettes, a picture travelogue, in 1960. In 1963, lectured under sponsorship in East Africa. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) also supported Fax, alongside artists Jacob Lawrence and James Lewis, to travel to West Africa. Eventually he travelled to Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, and others. Back in the US, he became a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 1968.

The Soviet Writer’s Union invited him to the USSR in 1971.  This began a long admiration of communism as a just treatment of blacks.  Fax received the Coretta Scott King Book Award from the American Library Association in 1972 for his book Seventeen Black Artists (1971), a profile collection of famous Black artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Roy de Carava, Benny Andrews, and Norma Morgan. In the same year, Fax’s Garvey: The Story of a Pioneer Black Nationalist (1972) was released, a biography of the Black activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940).   He returned to the Soviet Writer’s Union in 1973.  His African visits resulted in Fax’s Through Black Eyes: Journey of a Black Artist of East Africa and Russia in 1974.  A 1976 Rockefeller Foundation Research Grant allowed Fax to travel to return to Italy. Between international travels, Fax lived in New York City.  Five years later, Fax published Black Artists of the New Generation (1977), with Romare Bearden writing the Forward, all these later books published by Progress Publishers, a Russian English-language publisher.

Fax focused in his writing on interviews in his book writing. When writing both Black Artists of the New Generation and Seventeen Black Artists, Fax interviewed every artist discussed in the two books. Fax received Syracuse University’s Chancellor’s Medal in 1990 for these works.  Politically he contrasted the traditional American view of black artists, contrasting them to the reception in African and communist Russia.

The New York Public Library and Syracuse University hold the most expansive collections of Elton Fax’s papers, with other papers, artworks, and documents stored at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities and Boston University.


Selected Bibliography

  • West African Vignettes. New York: American Society of African Culture, 1960.
  • Contemporary Black Leaders. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1970.
  • Seventeen Black Artists. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1971.
  • ​​Garvey: The Story of a Pioneer Black Nationalist. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1972.
  • Through Black Eyes: Journey of a Black Artist fo East Africa and Russia. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1974.
  • Black Artists of the New Generation. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1977.
  • Hashar. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980.
  • Elyuchin. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983.
  • “It’s Been a Beautiful but Rugged Journey.” Black American Literature Forum 20, no. 3 (1986): 273-288.
  • Soviet People as I Knew Them. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988.

Sources

  • Baker, James K. “The American Society of African Culture.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 4, no. 3 (1966): 367-369.
  • Cederholm, Theresa Dickason. Afro-American Artists: A Bio-bibliographical Directory. Boston: Trustees of the Boston Public Library, 1973.
  • Driskell, David C. “Bibliographies in Afro-American Art.” American Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1978): 374-394.
  • Falk, Pete Hastings et al. ed. Who was Who in American Art, 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America. Vol. One. Madison: South View Press, 1999.
  • Hastings Falk, Pete et al. ed. Who was Who in American Art, 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America. Vol. 1. Madison: South View Press, 1999.
  • Johnson, Toki. “Elton and Grace Fax in Mexico, 1956.” New Pittsburgh Courier, September 8, 1956.
  • Locke, Alain, ed. The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art. Washington D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 131.
  • MacDowell. “Elton Fax.” MacDowell, accessed February 15, 2024, macdowell.org/artists/elton-fax.
  • Pendergast, Sara and Tom Pendergast. Contemporary Black Biography: Profiles from the International Black Community, Vol. 48. Farmington Hills: Thomas Gale, 2005, 67-68.
  • Peters, Ida. “Black History Feature: Elton Clay Fax.” Afro-American, February 16, 1980, 11.
  • R. Bowker. Who’s Who in American Art, 20th ed. New Providence: R. R. Bowker, 1993.
  • R. Bowker. Who’s Who in American Art, 21th ed. New Providence: R. R. Bowker, 1995.

Archives


Contributors: Zhihui Jerry Zou


Citation

Zhihui Jerry Zou. "Fax, Elton Clay." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/faxe/.


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Fax was a writer, cartoonist, Coretta Scott King Book Award recipient, and illustrator for the New York Times and many other publications. He focused on producing biographical narratives of both famous and emerging African American artists in his collections, especially in his book “Seventeen Black Artists.”

Sims, Lowery Stokes

Full Name: Stokes, Lowery Sims

Other Names:

  • Lowery Stokes Sims
  • Lowery Sims

Gender: female

Date Born: 13 February 1949

Place Born: Washington, DC, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African (general, continental cultures), African American, Contemporary (style of art), Latin American, Modern (style or period), and Native American

Career(s): administrators, art critics, authors, curators, directors (administrators), museum directors, and researchers

Institution(s): Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, and The Studio Museum in Harlem


Overview

First African American curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972-1999, Executive Director and President of the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC. Sims was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens, NY, attending Queens College from 1966-1970, where she discovered and majored in art history. Following this, she attended Johns Hopkins University, where she completed a master’s thesis on African architecture in 1972. After graduating, she was hired at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant museum educator for the Community Programs Department and eventually became the first African-American curator at the Met for the 20th Century Art Department.

While working there, she began to work on her Ph.D thesis, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, under Robert Pincus-Witten at the City University of New York from 1980-1995. She worked additionally as a guest curator at many alternative museums, and later claimed these exhibits as the reason she was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism by the College Art Association in 1991. That same year, she published her book Stuart Davis: American Painter based on the eponymous exhibit she co-curated with Bill Agee. Another of her major exhibits, [“Richard Pousette-Dart, 1916-1992” 1997-1998], was notable in promoting a previously overlooked artist; her book of the same name, cowritten with Stephen Polcari, was published in 1997. During her tenure, she curated over forty exhibits at the Met, focusing on including overlooked white male artists, women artists, and artists of color throughout her career as a participant in the feminist and black artists movement.

In 2000, she started working at the Studio Museum in Harlem as the executive director, where she placed emphasis on educational programs as well as curation and was responsible for securing funding for the gallery. While working there, her Ph.D thesis was published with the University of Texas Press in 2002, seven years after she completed her degree, and Sims was named to the selection jury of the World Trade Center Memorial in 2003-2004.

Wanting to reduce her administrational duties, she was named president of the museum in 2005, leaving the directorship to Thelma Golden, and primarily worked on special projects and research while she began serving a two-year term as the chair of the Cultural Institutions Group of New York City. Sims arranged work as an adjunct curator at the museum and began to turn toward academia, teaching as a visiting professor Hunter College, Queens College (2005, 2006), and at Cornell University, where she was nominated to serve as the A.D. White Professor-at-Large (2005-2010). After leaving the Studio Museum in 2007, she also served as a fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota.

While teaching at the University of Minnesota and at Queens College, Sims began working as a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (MAD). At the MAD, she helped co-curate several exhibits on African-American and African art before becoming curator emerita in 2015. She was also the Distinguished Professor in the Art Department at the University of California at Irvine in 2014.

In 2018, the New York University Institute of Fine Arts appointed her to the Kirk Varnadoe Visiting Professorship, and she served as a visiting professor in 2019 and 2020. Sims now works as an independent curator, art historian, guest lecturer.


Selected Bibliography

  • [Dissertation] Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982. Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 1995, published, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 1995;
  • Stuart Davis: American Painter. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1991.
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), Rewald, S., Lieberman, W. S., & American Federation of Arts. Still Life: The Object in American Art, 1915-1995: Selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Rizzoli. 1996.
  • Romare Bearden. New York, N.Y.: Rizzoli Publications. 1993.
  • Polcari, S. Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1997;
  • [ed.] Fritz Scholder: Indian Not Indian. Washington, DC, and New York, NY: Smithsonian Institution and New York, N.Y.: Prestel. 2008;
    Ramírez, M. C., Rangel, G., Rivas, J., Basha, R., Pope, N. L., Lopes, F., … Museum of Arts and Design (New York, N.Y.). New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America. 2014.
  • Carr, D., & Museum of Fine Arts. Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston: MFA Publications. 2015.
  • Sims, Patterson. Joyce J. Scott: Harriet Tubman and Other Truths. Hamilton, New Jersey: Grounds for Sculpture. 2018.

Sources

  • Admin. “Lowery Stokes Sims.” UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts. https://art.arts.uci.edu/lowery-stokes-sims.
  • Carroll, Angela N. “Sisters in the Struggle: Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims.” BmoreArt, February 1, 2021. https://bmoreart.com/2021/02/sisters-in-the-struggle-leslie-king-hammond-and-lowery-stokes-sims.html.
  • Richards, Judith, and Lowery Stokes Sims. Oral history interview with Lowery Stokes Sims, 2010 July 15-22. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 2010.
    Sims, Lowery. Institute of Empathy: Saya Woolfalk (Real Art Ways: Publisher, 2011)
  • Sims, Lowery. “Lowery Sims.” https://www.linkedin.com/in/lowery-sims-2b255422/

Archives

  • Lowery Stokes Sims : artist file, American Craft Council Library, https://digital.craftcouncil.org/digital/search/
  • Lowery Stokes Sims papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.si.edu/es/object/archives/sova-aaa-simslowe

 


Contributors: Monet Shum


Citation

Monet Shum. "Sims, Lowery Stokes." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/simsl/.


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First African American curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972-1999, Executive Director and President of the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC. Sims was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens, NY.

King-Hammond, Leslie

Full Name: King-Hammond, Leslie

Other Names:

  • Leslie Ann King
  • Leslie King-Hammond

Gender: female

Date Born: 04 August 1944

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, Modern (style or period), nineteenth century (dates CE), and women (female humans)

Career(s): art historians and curators


Overview

First African American president of the College Art Association (CAA). Leslie King-Hammond was born on August 4, 1944, in South Bronx, New York to parents originally from Barbados. King-Hammond largely raised her two younger sisters. Having lost sight in one eye, the young King-Hammond became fascinated with art from watching a glass-blower creating her artificial eyes. Her family later moved to Baltimore, where she currently lives.

After graduating high school in 1964, she attended the State University of New York at Buffalo but dropped out. She then worked at General Electric, taking night classes at The New School.

In 1967, she received a full scholarship at Queens College and earned her BFA there in 1969, focusing on painting and ceramic sculpture. Upon graduation, she turned to art history obtaining her MA in 1973 and PhD in 1975, both from Johns Hopkins University. Charles Stuckey (b. 1945) was her PhD advisor with Egon Verheyen (1936-2008) serving as the second reader.

For the first two years of her career, King-Hammond worked in New York City to promote education and job opportunities for young African Americans. As one of the first cohorts of African art history graduate students at Johns Hopkins University, she and her close friend and fellow graduate student, Lowery Stokes Sims, were guides to younger students.

She began curating collections in the early 1970s at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland Art Place, and others. King-Hammond started teaching at The Maryland Institute College of Arts (MICA) in 1973, first as a part-time lecturer in art history before becoming a professor, administrator, and curator. Three years after her initial appointment, she was promoted to Graduate Studies Dean and went on to receive a Mellon Grant for Faculty Research in 1984. Between 1977 and 1982, King-Hammond was a doctoral supervisor at the Department of African Studies at Howard University.

In 1974, King-Hammond received a Kress Fellowship, a key moment in her curatorial career. In 1982, she curated the “Ritual and Myth: A Survey of African American Art” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This exhibition featured around forty-five artists and more than seventy works. Some of her notable exhibitions include the 1989 “Black Printmakers and the WPA” and, with Lowery Stokes Sims, the 1988-1989 “Art as a Verb: The Evolving Continuum” at MICA.  She and Sims co-curated multiple exhibitions featuring African American artists, such as the 1994 “Jacob Lawrence, An Overview: Paintings from 1936-1994.”

She was a National Endowment of the Humanities panelist between 1980 and 1982, served as the Commissioner for Baltimore’s Civic Design Commission from 1983 to 1987, and directed the Phillip Morris Scholarships for Artists of Color from 1985 to 1998.  Around 2000, King-Hammond met Jose J. Mapily, a sculptor and art professor. The two became close collaborators in art. In 2002, she received the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2007, she was elected to be the Chairperson of the Board of Directors at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. She added transatlantic African art to her research expertise in the late 2000s decade and, with Sims, curated the exhibition “The Global Africa Project,” which premiered in the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

King-Hammond’s research focuses mostly on nineteenth and twentieth-century African American art and women artists. Her work on William Henry Johnson, the focus of her PhD dissertation in 1975 titled “The Life and Works of William Henry Johnson, 1901-1970,” received critical applause from Beth Anne Margolies. Some other artists whom she has written literature or curated exhibitions for include Hughie Lee-Smith and Jacob Lawrence.

While being an academic, King-Hammond maintained an artist. Her assemblage “Barbadian Spirits: Altar for My Grandmother Ottalie Adalese Maxwell (1882-1991)” was exhibited in 1997, which explored her Barbadian ancestry and her family.

King-Hammond is currently a senior fellow at the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and MICA’s Founding Director of the Center for Race and Culture, MICA offers a graduate student fellowship in her name.

Historians and writers such as Lisa Farrington and Beth Anne Margolies have cited her as a foundational figure in African American art history.


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation:] The Life and Works of William Henry Johnson, 1901-1970. Johns Hopkins University, 1975.
  • Ritual and Myth: A Survey of African-American Art. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1982.
  • Black Printmakers and the WPA. New York: Lehman College Art Gallery, 1989.
  • Gumbo YaYa: Anthology of Contemporary African-American Women Artists. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1995.
  • Masks and Mirrors: African-American Art, 1700–Now. New York: Abbeville, 1995.
  • and Benjamin, Tritobia.  Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox. Philadelphia: Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, 1996.
  • “Identifying Spaces of Blackness: The Aesthetics of Resistance and Identity in American Planation Art.” In Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art, edited by Angela D. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius, 58-84. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008.
  • Hughie Lee-Smith. San Francisco: Pomegranate Press, 2010.
  • and Naomi Beckwith, Judith Bettelheim, Christopher Cozier, et al. The Global Africa Project. Prestel: Museum of Art and Design, 2010.

Sources

  • Burchard, Hank. “Some Who Can Do as well as Teach,” The Washington Post, January 8, 1998.
  • Sims, Lowery Stokes, “Leslie King-Hammond: Sister, Mentor, Prime Mover.” The International Review of African American Art 18, no. 1 (2001): 34-35.
  • The History Makers. “Leslie King-Hammond.” The History Makers, April 26, 2007, thehistorymakers.org/biography/leslie-king-hammond-41.
  • Farrington, Lisa. Creating their Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Marquis. Who’s Who in American Art, 36th ed. New Providence: Marquis Who’s Who, 2016, p. 504.
  • Mabe, Chauncey. “Leslie King Hammond–Making Order Out of the Chaos,” Florida International University, accessed January 19, 2024, artspeak.fiu.edu/reviews/leslie-king-hammond-making-order-out-of-the-chaos/.
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Minority Artist Biographical Sources,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, accessed January 19, 2024, americanart.si.edu/research/my-art/learn-more/minority.


Contributors: Zhihui Jerry Zou


Citation

Zhihui Jerry Zou. "King-Hammond, Leslie." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/king-hammondl/.


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King-Hammond is an art historian focusing on nineteenth and twentieth-century African American art and women artists. She is also the Founding Director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Arts and the first African American president of the College Art Association.

Möller, Emil

Full Name: Möller, Emil

Gender: male

Date Born: 20 March 1869

Date Died: 1955

Place Born: Hörde, Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Renaissance

Career(s): art historians and clergy


Overview

Catholic priest and private Leonardo scholar.  Möller grew up in a small town near Dortmund, Germany.  After taking priestly orders in the Catholic church, he worked as a rector of a upper boys’ school.   During his life he held membership in the workers committee for the Dürer Club (Dürersbunde) in Medebach, then in the county of Brilon.  He focused studies on Leonardo da Vinci.

In the 1930’s Möller discovered definitive documentation of the date of Leonardo’s birth. Möller had uncovered a note written by Leonardo’s grandfather, Antonio, which indicated the exact time and date of Leonardo’s birth.  Möller was to present this research on Leonardo at a conference scheduled the day before World War II was declared;  it never took place.   In the early 1950s Möller met and became the mentor of the young amateur Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti.  The younger scholar became devoted to Father Möller and dedicated his first book on Leonardo to him.  When Möller died in 1955, he left his library to Pedretti who later became professor of art history and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Though a prominent scholar, Möller’s discover of Leonardo’s birth date obscured by World War II. As late as 1956, the Leonardo scholars Costantino Baroni (1905-1956) and Ignazio Calvi (1908-2002) in their book on Leonardo, denied that any substantiated evidence existed for the time and date of Leonardo’s birth (Mandeville).


Selected Bibliography

  • “Leonardos Bildnis der Cecilia Gallerani in der Galerie des Fürsten Czartoryski in Krakau.”
    Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 9, no. 9 (1916): 313-326;
  • “Zwei Bisher Unerkannte Bildnissde der Mona Lisa.” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 11, no. 1 (January 1918): 1-14;
  • “Leonardo’s Madonna with the Yarn Winder.” Burlington Magazine 49, no. 281 (August 1926):61-63ff.;
  • “Der geburtstag des Lionardo da Vinci.” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 60 no. 2  (1939):71-75;
  • “Die Madonna mit der Katze.” Pantheon 25 (February 1940): 47-48;

Sources

  • Wer ist’s: Unsere Zeitgenossen. Hermann Degener, ed. 4th ed., 1909, p. 339;
  • Mariani, Pietro. “Carlo Pedretti (1928—2018).”  Burlington Magazine 160, no. 1383: 529-530;


Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Möller, Emil." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mollere/.


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Leonardo da Vinci scholar; influential teacher

Cott, Perry Blythe

Image Credit: Monuments Men and Women

Full Name: Cott, Perry Blythe

Gender: male

Date Born: 27 March 1909

Date Died: 1998

Place Born: Cleveland, Cuyahoga, OH, USA

Place Died: Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Arabic (style), Italian (culture or style), and Renaissance

Career(s): curators

Institution(s): National Gallery of Art and Worcester Art Museum


Overview

Chief Curator, National Gallery of Art, 1956-1969. Cott was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1909, and raised by his mother, Laura Jane Daugherty, and father, Edison Perry Cott. Cott graduated from Princeton University with an undergraduate degree. Soon after, he pursued a PhD in Fine Arts from the same institution, which was conferred in 1938. His dissertation topic was on the Sicilian-Arabic ivory carvings of the middle ages, written under advisors Charles Rufus Morey, E. Baldwin Smith and George Elderkin. He subsequently published this thesis in 1939 under the same title.

The same year, Cott began his career as a curator and administrator at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. During this, he wrote “A Sasanian Stucco Plaque in the Worcester Art Museum.”, published by Ars Islamica 6 in 1939. His tenure was interrupted in 1943 to serve in World War II, where he served as a Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) “Monuments Men” Officer for Western Sicily. Cott spent much of his time assessing the condition of sites such as the Arch of Constantine and Galleria Borghese and coordinating repair operations. He concurrently collaborated with the Director of Fine Arts for the Vatican States to curate “Exhibition of Masterpieces of European Painting”, which remained open for viewing at the Palazzo Venezia from August 27, 1944 to February 18, 1945. In August 1945, Cott was transferred to Austria, where he curated an exhibition of paintings from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.

Following his service, Cott returned briefly to his role at the Worcester Art Museum and penned the museum’s handbook, Art Through Fifty Centuries, in 1948. On September 1st, 1949, Cott succeeded Charles Seymour Jr. as the National Gallery of Art’s Assistant Chief Curator. Seven years later, he was promoted to the Chief Curator for the National Gallery of Art, a post he remained in for 13 years. During his tenure, the gallery acquired over 900 paintings, including some of the gallery’s most illustrious works, A Young Girl Reading by Fragonard, and Ginevra de’Benci by Leonardo da Vinci. Cott wrote a book about the latter work titled Leonardo Da Vinci: Ginevra de’Benci, published in 1967.

On July 1st, 1969, Cott retired from his post as the Chief Curator and Executive Officer of the National Gallery of Art. When the director of the gallery, John Walker, announced both his own and Cott’s retirement, he noted that “During his [Cott’s] 13 years as Chief Curator, years when the National Gallery acquired so many important paintings, Perry Cott has influenced every decision.”


Selected Bibliography

  • “American Painting of Today.” The American Magazine of Art 27, no. 1 (1934): 10–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23954939.
  • Art Through Fifty Centuries from the Collections of the Worcester Art Museum. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 1948.
  • “A Sasanian Stucco Plaque in the Worcester Art Museum.” Ars Islamica 6, no. 2 (1939): 167–68. 
  • Leonardo Da Vinci: “Ginevra de’Benci.” The National Gallery of Art, 1967.
  • “Siculo-Arabic Ivories.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 60, no. 3 (September 1940): 424.
  • “Summaries of Papers Read at the Recent Annual Meeting of the College Art Association.” Parnassus 2, no. 1 (1930): 40–42.

Sources



Contributors: Zahra Hassan


Citation

Zahra Hassan. "Cott, Perry Blythe." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/cottp/.


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Chief Curator, National Gallery of Art, 1956-1969.

Rose, Bernice

Full Name: Rose, Bernice

Other Names:

  • Bernice Rose
  • Bernice Berend
  • Bernice Berend Rose
  • Bunny
  • Bernice Harriet Berend Rose

Gender: female

Date Born: 07 October 1935

Date Died: 14 April 2023

Place Born: Miami, Miami-Dade, FL, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Abstract Expressionist and Modern (style or period)

Career(s): art historians and curators

Institution(s): Menil Collection and Museum of Modern Art


Overview

Museum curator and gallerist who brought the study of drawing to the fore of study. Rose was born as Bernice Berend to Rose and Bert Berend. Her mother was a homemaker and her father sold electrical fixtures in Miami Beach. The family relocated to Brooklyn, New York, in 1941 when she was about six. In 1956, she married Herbert Bernard Rose (1929–2010), a lawyer to many prominent American charitable organizations.  Rose received a B.A. from Hunter College, City of New York, where she studied painting with Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes, two artists at the forefront of modern art. In 1965 she joined the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as a secretary in the department of painting and sculpture. Moving rapidly, she was given curatorial options.  Her first exhibition was “Jackson Pollock, Works on Paper,” 1969.  By 1971 she was named associate curator of the Museum’s newly created Drawings Department. She served under the tutelage of MOMA’s chief curator, William Lieberman, a curator known for his encyclopedic visual memory.  Through Lieberman she, too, developed an acute eye (Glueck).   As curator in the museum’s drawing department, Rose organized numerous exhibitions, including her 1976 landmark show, “Drawing Now: 1955-1975” featuring drawings by artists not known for that medium. In that show, Rose highlighted the way in which these artists were transforming drawing. Together with Jean Leymarie (1919-2006) director of the French Academy in Rome and French museum curator Geneviève Monnier (b. 1939), she published Drawing: History of an Art, the first major history of drawing, in 1979.  Another monumental show, “Cezanne Treasure: The Basel Sketchbooks” was launched in 1988.  In 1993 she transitioned to the gallery world, joining PaceWildenstein, where she led a department strictly devoted to drawings. There she was responsible for the 1995 “Picasso and Drawing,” featuring  a number of rarely seen works lent from private collections. By then she and her husband were living in Kips Bay Plaza, an early work of I. M. Pei in New York. When the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center was founded, Rose was hired as its first Chief Curator in 2007.  She oversaw the foundation’s more that 1,200 works on paper as well as developing the study center’s mission.  She retired from the Menil in 2018.  Shortly after completing the six-volume Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing in 2023, she died of pancreatic cancer at her home in Manhattan.   She is not related to the art historian Barbara Rose though the two knew each another.

 

Rose was one of the first curators to recognize that younger artists were creating drawings as a separate artistic form. She argued that contemporary drawing was as significant as the other media artists created, countering consensus in the 1960s and 1970s that it was of interest only as a study for a completed art work (Costello).


Selected Bibliography

  • and Geneviève Monnier. Drawing: History of an Art. New York: Rizzoli, 1979;
  • Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing. 6 vols. Houston: The Menil Collection, 2018-2023.

Sources



Contributors: Eileen Costello


Citation

Eileen Costello. "Rose, Bernice." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/roseb1934/.


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Museum curator and gallerist who brought the study of drawing to the fore of study. Rose was born as Bernice Berend to Rose and Bert Berend.