Independent Art Historian | New York

Annette Blaugrund,PhD has published and lectured widely on diverse subjects in American art and culture. She was the director of the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts from 1997 to 2007, and before that the Andrew W. Mellon senior curator at the New-York Historical Society. She also worked as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has written fifteen books about American art and contributed seven chapters and 33 articles to other publications. The National Academy gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and the French government named her a Chevalier in the Order of Arts in 1992, among other honors. She holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University (1987), where for six years she taught American art (1996–2001), and she currently sits on the art history department’s advisory council. Her most recent publications are The Way Back: The Paintings of George A. Weymouth (Rizzoli, 2018), for the Brandywine River Museum of Art; and Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect (Monacelli Press, 2016), for the Thomas Cole National Historic Site (TCNHS) in Catskill, NY, and the Columbus Museum of Art, OH. She was elected to the Women Writing Women’s Lives in 2012 after writing Dispensing Beauty in New York and Beyond, a biography of Harriet Hubbard Ayer, the first woman cosmetic mogul, in 1886, in the US. For the last six years, she has served as advisor and curator for the TCNHS.