Patricia Hills, Professor Emerita, Boston University  

Background and employment:

Professor Hills received her B.A. degree from Stanford University; her M.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York; and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.  From 1972 to 1987 she was associate curator or adjunct curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  During this time she also began a career teaching, first at York College and the Graduate Center of the City College of New York (CUNY) from 1974-78, and then at Boston University, where she taught from 1978 to 2014 in the Department of Art History (with affiliations with the American and New England Studies program and the Afro-American Studies). 

At BU she also served as Director of the Boston University Art Gallery (1980-89); Chair of the Department (1995-97); and Acting Chair (Spring 2009; Spring 2012).  During those years she also taught as Adjunct Associate Professor at the graduate schools of Columbia University, the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and, as Visiting Professor, at the J. F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin.  She also taught summer sessions (to both undergraduate and grad students) at the University of Wyoming and at B.U.’s program in Monaco.  In all she directed over forty dissertations at BU, and others at Columbia, Harvard, and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Her subjects:

She taught courses on American art and visual culture:  American painting from 1840 to the present, artists of the American West, women artists, 1930s culture, African American 20^th-century artists and art and politics. She has lectured across the country at universities and museums and in Amsterdam, Munich, and Berlin.  She has also participated in numerous panel discussions, dissertation committees, and editing projects.

Major books and catalogues for exhibitions Hills organized:

Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (2010); Syncopated Rhythms:  20^th–

Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection(co-authored, 2005); May Stevens (2005); Modern Art in the USA:  Issues and Controversies of the 20^thCentury (2001); Eastman Johnson:  Painting America (co-curated, 1999); Stuart Davis (1996); John Singer Sargent (1986); Social Concern in the ‘80s:  A New England Perspective (1984); 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); and Eastman Johnson (1972).

The Eastman Johnson website was completed: See Hills, Patricia and Abigael MacGibeny. Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné, https://www.eastmanjohnson.org.  “Paintings” published July 29, 2021; “Drawings and Prints” published April 5, 2022.  Site is still being maintained.

Other written work:

She has also contributed book chapters for anthologies and essays to catalogues of major exhibitions, such as  Unforgettables  (2022);  Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage (2023);  The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (2022); The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2020); For America:  Paintings from the National Academy of Design (2019);  Perfectly American:  The Art-Union & Its Artists (2011); 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); Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (2000); Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850 (1998); Redefining American History Painting(1995);  Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (1993);  Berlin-New York, Like and Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present (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); Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg und die bildenden Künste (1989); The Rural Vision:  France and America in the Late Nineteenth Century (1987); Essays from the Lowell Conferences on Industrial History, 1982 and 1983 (1985); Das Andere Amerika: Geschichte, Kunst und Kultur der amerikanischen Arbeiterbewegung (1983). For a sampling of her writing, see https://bu.academia.edu/PatriciaHills

Her articles have appeared in American Art, Oxford Art Journal, Prospects, Archives of American Art Journal, Dictionary of Women Artists, The Encyclopedia of New York City, American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts Vol. 2,  Art New England, Journal of the Early Republic, Arts, Art News, Antiques, African American Review, Journal of American Studies, the Los Angeles Times Book Review  and internet articles in Panorama: Journal of the Historians of American Art,  Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, History Now, and Berkshire Fine Arts.   

Fellowships and Awards:

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.  John Singer Sargent (1986), won the Henry Allen Moe Prize for most outstanding exhibition catalogue in the State of New York for the year 1986.  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).  

She has held both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships; 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; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; and the Terra Foundation of American Art.

In February 2011 she received the “Distinguished Teaching of Art History” award from the College Art Association. 

Current Projects:

She currently is Director and co-author with Abigael MacGibeny of the Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné, a project for which the long-term steward is the National Academy of Design (founded in NYC in 1825).  Funding has come from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, the Boston University Retired Faculty Association, the Lunder Foundation and over fifty private donors.  See www.eastmanjohnson.org

She is director and co-trustee of the May Stevens and Rudolf Baranik Foundation, based in New York.  See http://www.stevensbaranikfoundation

Future plans:  Manuscript completed, titled “Art World Feminist:  Personal, Political, Professional Journeys” – a memoir about first breaks into the museum world, graduate school life, juggling family responsibilities and babies, and gender discrimination as background for a career spanning the counter-culture 1960s to the multi-cultural 1990s and to the technological age of the early 21^st century.

She is also halfway through a book manuscript, “The Partisan Eye:  Class, Race, Democracy, and the Visual Arts from the 1930s to the 1950s.”  Chapters are focused on art critic/historian Meyer Schapiro, arts administrator Gwendolyn Bennett, union organizer and artist Philip Evergood, American artists responding to the Spanish Civil War, artist Jacob Lawrence, and expatriate artist Elizabeth Catlett.

Another project is finishing a book on the artist Joyce Kozloff.

Professor Hills lives in Brooklyn, is widowed, and has three children. 

See All Her Books Here