Patricia Hills

Professor Hills teaches 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 inAmerican 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.