Patricia Hills teaches American art history at Boston University. She specializes in 19th- and 20th-century portraits and genre painting; African American art; art and politics in the 20th century.
Patricia Hills – Narrative Biography (Oct. 2008)
Professor of Art History at Boston University, she writes on both 19th- and 20th-century American art. For over thirty years, as both a scholar and museum curator, she has produced books and articles on contemporary women artists, African American art, American genre, figure painting, and portraiture in 19th-century America, and the interrelationship of visual culture and political and social history. In addition to teaching at B.U., she directed the B. U. Art Gallery from 1980-89, (except for two leaves), was Director of Museum Studies (1980-91), and Chair of the Department (1995-97).
Major books and catalogues for exhibitions she organized include: May Stevens (Pomegranate, 2005); co-curator with Melissa Renn, Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American from the George and Joyce Wein Collection (Boston University Art Gallery, 2005); college textbook/reader, Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (Prentice Hall, 2001); co-curator with Teresa A. Carbone, Eastman Johnson: Painting America (The Brooklyn Museum, 1999); Stuart Davis (Abrams, 1996): John Singer Sargent (Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams, 1986); Alice Neel (Abrams, 1983); Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s, (Boston University Art Gallery, 1983); co-curator with Roberta Tarbell, The Figurative Tradition and The Whitney Museum of American Art: Paintings and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980); Turn-of-the-Century America: Paintings, Graphics, Photographs, 1890-1910 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977); The Painters’ America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910 (Whitney Museum of American Art/Praeger, 1974); The American Frontier: Images and Myths (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973); Eastman Johnson (Whitney Museum of American Art/Clarkson-Potter, 1972).
The catalogues for John Singer Sargent and Eastman Johnson: Painting America received Henry Allen Moe Awards for “most outstanding catalogue of an exhibition mounted [in 1986 and 1999, respectively] in New York State.”
Essays in major exhibition catalogues organized by other museum curators include: Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, 2000 (The Phillips Collection, Washington DC); Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, 1993 (The Phillips Collection, Washington DC); Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack, a Retrospective 1950-1990, 1992 (Wooster Art Museum); The West as America, 1991 (National Museum of American Art); Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, 1990 (Timken Art Gallery, San Diego). Her articles have also appeared in American Art, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Oxford Art Journal, Prospects, Archives of American Art Journal, Dictionary of Women Artists, and The Encyclopedia of New York City. Also 12 book chapters for anthologies. She has written occasional criticism and reviews for Art New England. She has lectured widely on topics in American art at museums, colleges and universities in the U.S. and Europe.
She received her B.A. degree from Stanford University and worked at the Museum of Modern Art as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints. She later received an M.A. degree from Hunter College, City University of New York (in 1968), and her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (in 1973). Before coming to Boston University in 1978, she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as Associate Curator of 18th- and 19th-Century Art (1972-74), and then Adjunct Curator (1974-87). She taught full time (1974-78) at York College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught graduate seminars at the Institute of Fine Arts, Columbia University, and the University of Wyoming. In 1974 the State Department sent her to Europe on a two-week lecture tour in connection with a USIA touring exhibition, a smaller version of The American Frontier.
She has received fellowship grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1982-83), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1995), the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (2005), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2005-06), and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center (2006), and has also been a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center (1982-83) and at the W.E.B. DuBois Center (1991-92; 2006-07), both of Harvard University. She belongs to the College Art Association, the American Studies Association, Women’s Caucus for Art, and the American Association of Museums. In Feb. 1987 she was “Honored at Mid-Career” by the Women’s Caucus for Art.