Professor Emerita; American & African American Art
Professor Hills taught 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: 20th-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 20thCentury (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), Eastman Johnson (1972).
She currently is Director of the Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné, a project for which the long-term steward will be 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, and the Boston University Retired Faculty Association. The launch of the EJCR website will be April 2021.
She has also contributed book chapters for anthologies and essays to catalogues of major exhibitions, such as 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).
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 New England, Journal of the Early Republic, Arts, Art News, Antiques, African American Review, Journal of American Studies, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
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 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, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and 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).
Latest project launched in July 2021: National Academy of Design: Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné