Awards

2011 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award

Patricia Hills, Boston University

Patricia Hills (photograph by Michael Hamilton)

An active, gifted teacher, faithful mentor, and valued colleague, Patricia Hills has maintained a prodigious career, producing scholarship that has profoundly shaped the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture, and African American art in particular. Her textbook Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the Twentieth Century (2001) has become standard reading in the field, and her books and articles on Jacob Lawrence, May Stevens, Alice Neel, Stuart Davis, John Singer Sargent, Romare Bearden, and Eastman Johnson are highly esteemed by many. As professor of art history at Boston University, she is a creative, active, and engaged classroom leader who has developed an innovative style of teaching that emphasizes intellectual role-playing and demonstrates striking methodological openness. Hills’s admirable commitment to the time-demanding aspects of pedagogy, such as her rigorous attention to student writing, and her ability to combine that investment with a remarkable publication record, are a model for students and teachers across the discipline.

As repeatedly express in her many letters of support, Hills is an inspiration to generations of art historians past, present, and future. She accomplishes this through passionate care and attention, working closely with current students while maintaining contact many former ones whose careers she continuously helps to advance. Boston University’s Graduate Student Art History Association has twice recognized her, in 1998 and 2005, for “outstanding commitment and ongoing support to the intellectual and social life of the graduate community.” Hills’s leadership as an administrator has benefited them tremendously, thanks to her success in locating external funding for teaching and curatorial fellowships, dissertation research grants, conference travel stipends, and summer research grants through a stable, consistent program of alumni giving.

Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (2009)

Hills earned a BA from Stanford University in 1957, an MA from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1968, and a PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1973. She has taught at Boston University since 1978, where she also served as director of the Boston University Art Gallery (1980–89) and director of the program in museum studies (1980–91). The recipient of many distinguished grants and fellowships, including those from Harvard University’s W. E .B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York, Hills has organized numerous highly praised exhibitions—including Eastman Johnson: Painting America at the Brooklyn Museum (with Teresa A. Carbone, 1999–2000) and John Singer Sargent at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago (1986–87)—that have advanced the field of modern American art. Her most recent publication, Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (2009), surveys the artist’s entire career through archival research, social and cultural history, interviews with artists, and close examinations of the works.

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