Patricia 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. She has been appointed Professor Emerita of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University as of July 2014,
She has taught at BU since 1978. She was formerly a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1971-78; Adjunct Curator 1978-87), and also served as Director of the B. U. Art Gallery. In addition, she has taught at York College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York; at the graduate school of Columbia University; at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and for summer sessions at the University of Wyoming; B.U.’s program in Monaco; and at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Freie Universität in Berlin.
In February 2011 she received the “Distinguished Teaching of Art History” award from the College Art Association.
She has written criticism, art historical essays, books, and exhibition catalogues on both 19th– and 20th-Century American Art, including the social history of genre painting, feminist art, African American art, and art and politics. A selection of her books include Alice Neel (1983), John Singer Sargent (1986), Stuart Davis (1995), and May Stevens (2005). She co-authored The Figurative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1980) and Eastman Johnson: Painting America (1999). Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (2001) brought together writings by artists, poets, and critics to narrate the history of art controversies in the U.S. A Chinese edition will be available in 2018. Her book Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence was published by the University of California Press (2009). Exhibition and book reviews and feature critical essays have appeared in Art New England, Arts Magazine, Oxford Art Journal, Artforum, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review and will be available on this Website.
She has received fellowships and grants from the following: Guggenheim Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Boston University Center for the Humanities; the Charles Warren Center and W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, both at Harvard University; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. She will continue her scholarship after retirement and plans to write a book on the contemporary artist Joyce Kozloff and complete the catalogue raisonné of the portraits and genre paintings of the American painter Eastman Johnson (1824-1907). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband Kevin Whitfield. She has three children and two step-children. (Also listed in Who’s Who in America.)
