Henry Adams

Read Adams's presentation by clicking here: Rockwell Kent: An Appreciation.

The most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an artist…
—Painter Andrew Wyeth commenting on
Henry Adams's Eakins Revealed

Henry Adams is a graduate of Harvard University, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale, where he received the Frances Blanshard Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in Art History. In 1985, he received the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize of the College Art Association, the first time this had been awarded to an Americanist or a Museum Curator. In 1989, when he was a curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, William Jewell College awarded him its distinguished service medal for his services to Kansas City and the Midwest. In 2001, when he was a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he received the Northern Ohio Live Visual Arts Award for the best art exhibition of the year in Northern Ohio. In April 2010, The Beauty of Damage, a Tom Ball/Telos Production film that he initiated and scripted with Tom Ball won the Kodak Best Ohio Short Film at the 34th Cleveland International Film Festival. In June 2010 he received
the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Cleveland Arts Prize.

Henry Adams

Adams is the author of over 300 scholarly and popular articles, ranging over the American field from the 17th century to the present, as well as numerous books, among them Eakins Revealed. His most recent publication is Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. Dr. Adams has served as Curator of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and as Curator of American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He has also taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Pittsburgh, Colorado College, the University of Kansas, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He currently serves as Professor of American Art at Case Western Reserve University. In 1989, in partnership with film maker Ken Burns, Adams produced a documentary on Thomas Hart Benton which was broadcast nationally on PBS to an audience of 20 million.

Adams practices art history with a novelist's narrative skills and psychological acuity, a sleuth's instincts, a passion for aesthetic and technical explications, and a gift for sea change interpretations… Encompassing a stunning discovery by his art-historian wife, Adams' commanding,
corrective double portrait reveals myriad camouflaged truths.

—Donna Seaman, Booklist, on Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives
of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock

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