Boston University Home Page Boston University Home Page
Title Bar Art History Home Page
Frequently Asked Questions Contact
About the Department News & Events Programs & Courses Faculty & Staff Visual Resource Center Graduate Student Association

African/African Diaspora

PATRICIA HILLS

725 Commonwealth Ave, Rm 302
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Telephone: (617) 353-2521
Fax: (617) 353-3243
E-mail: pathills@bu.edu

curriculum vitae

Acting Chair, Professor; American Art.
B.A., Stanford University; M.A., City University of New York, Hunter College; Ph.D., 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 Painting 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), Eastman Johnson (1972). She has also contributed essays to 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 Artist, The Encyclopedia of New York City, American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts Vol. 2, Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850 (1998), 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 Center and the W. E. B. Du Bois 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 2001. She is currently writing a book on Jacob Lawrence.

 

MARGARET VENDRYES

725 Commonwealth Ave, Rm 305B
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Telephone: (617) 353-1471
Fax: (617) 353-3243

Lecturer, African Art;
B.A., Amherst College; M.A., Tulane University; Ph.D., Princeton University.

Professor Margaret Rose Vendryes received her AB in fine arts from Amherst College, MA in art history from Tulane University, and a second MA and Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University. She is an Americanist and Modernist with particular interests in African America, Africa, and contemporary visual culture. Vendryes wrote her dissertation on the art and life of the late African-American figurative sculptor Richmond Barthé. In addition to numerous talks given in the United States, Vendryes has lectured and given papers abroad in Kenya and Panama, conducted research in Jamaica, Haiti and Italy, has published several articles, essays, and reviews on American art, and continues to paint and create mixed-media constructions based on personal memories and feminist ideology. Vendryes is an Associate Professor in Art History in the Department of Performing and Fine Arts at York College. As 1998-99 scholar-in-residence at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Vendryes conducted new research on representations of the black body in modern American art and literature. She was awarded a 2003-04 American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to complete research for her monograph on Richmond Barthé which is forthcoming.

 

CYNTHIA BECKER

725 Commonwealth Ave, Rm 305B
Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Telephone: (617) 353-1471
Fax: (617) 353-3243
E-mail: cjbecker@bu.edu

curriculum vitae

Associate Professor; African Art. BA, University of New Orleans; MA, PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison

Professor Cynthia Becker is a scholar of African arts specializing in the arts of the Imazighen (Berbers) in northwestern Africa, specifically Morocco, Algeria, and Niger.  Her research has been supported by a Fulbright grant and several grants from the American Institute of Maghreb Studies.  Professor Becker has served as a consultant for numerous museum exhibitions and published articles on the visual and performing arts of the Imazighen as well as the trans-Saharan slave trade.  Her book Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity was published by the University of Texas Press in July of 2006.  She is currently working on a book about the Afro-Islamic aesthetics and ceremonial practices of the Gnawa that considers the history of the trans-Saharan slave trade and its implications on material culture in both western and northern Africa. Other projects include the visual expression of Amazigh consciousness by contemporary painters/activists, the influence of Sufism on contemporary Moroccan art, and the visual culture and history of the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans (her hometown).  

Boston University
Boston University
  Art History   BU   Directory  
Boston University Department of Art History | November 2, 2009
Art History Home Page About the Department News & Events Programs & Courses Faculty & Staff The Visual Resource Center The Graduate