Patricia Hills

Professor of Art History

Email: pathills@bu.edu
Phone: 617-353-2521

B.A. Modern European Literature, Stanford University; M.A. Art History, City University of New York, Hunter College; Ph.D. Art History, New York University

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: Stuart Davis (1996); John Singer Sargent (1986); Alice Neel (1983); Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Paintings of the 1930s (1983); The Figurative Tradition and The Whitney Museum of American Art: Paintings and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection (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). She has also contributed essays to the catalogues of major exhibitions, such as 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 Artists; The Encyclopedia of New York City; American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts Volume 2; Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850; and Redefining American History Painting (1995).

Eastman Johnson: Painting America (1999), which she 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 and the W.E.B. DuBois Center, both of Harvard University. Her textbook/ anthology Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century was published by Prentice Hall in 2000. Her recent book Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence was published by the University of California Press in December 2009.