Barter, Judith a. 1951-

(Judith Ann Barter)

PERSONAL: Born May 21, 1951, in Chicago, IL; daughter of Frederick Joseph and Emily Mary Barter. Education: Indiana University, B.A., 1973; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, M.A., 1975; attended University of California, Berkeley, 1984; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES: Office—Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60603. E-mail—jbarter@artic.edu.

CAREER: Museum curator, historian, author, and editor. St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, assistant curator, 1975-78; Amherst College, Amherst, MA, curator of collections at Mead Art Museum, 1978-86, associate director of the museum, 1986-92, instructor or lecturer, 1991-92; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Field-McCormick Curator of American Art, 1992—, and chair of American painting and sculpture to 1950 and American decorative arts. Worcester Art Museum, instructor, 1980; University of Chicago, adjunct professor, 1999; lecturer at other institutions, including College of the Holy Cross, Mount Holyoke College, National Gallery of Art, New York University, and Newberry Library; guest on media programs. Massachusetts Review, member of editorial board, 1986-91. Clark Art Institute, trustee of Williamstown Regional Conservation Laboratory.

MEMBER: National Association of College and University Museums and Galleries (past representative from Massachusetts), Association of Art Museum Curators (member of board of trustees), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Visiting scholar at Smithsonian Institution, 1992; Getty grant, 1996; named Chicagoan of the year in the arts, Chicago Tribune, 2005; grants from National Endowment of Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Henry Luce Foundation, and Cheney Foundation.

WRITINGS:

Currents of Expansion: Painting in the Midwest, 1820-1940 (exhibition catalog), St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO), 1977.

American Drawings and Watercolors from the Wad-sworth Atheneum (exhibition catalog), Hudson Hills (New York, NY), 1987.

(Organizer and contributor) Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman (exhibition catalog), Abrams (New York, NY), 1998.

(Coauthor) American Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (exhibition catalog), Hudson Hills (New York, NY), 1998.

Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890-1940 (exhibition catalog), Hudson Hills (New York, NY), 2003.

Shorter exhibition catalogs include “American Watercolors and Drawings,” 1986; “Representing Revolution,” 1989; and “The Prairie School Decorative Arts,” Art Institute of Chicago, 1996. Contributor to other exhibition companion books, including Edward Hopper, 2007. Contributor to periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS: Judith A. Barter is Field-McCormick Curator of American Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. Barter’s ninety-four-page book American Drawings and Watercolors from the Wadsworth Atheneum features sixty-four color plates and her accompanying essays. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, is the oldest public art museum in the United States. The book includes an introduction by Atheneum archivist Eugene R. Gaddis, who provides a history of the museum, its patrons, and various collections. The works represented are from the Atheneum’s permanent collection and were assembled for a traveling exhibition. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called it a superb jewel of a book” and considered Winslow Homer’s Fisher Girls on Shore, John Singer Sargent’s Nude Man, and Benjamin West’s portrait of Una from The Faerie Queene to be among the standouts.American Drawings and Watercolors contains photographs of the work of fifty artists, including Audubon, Copley, Demuth, Man, Hopper, Davis, Grosz, and Prendergast. The selection is especially rich in objective works from the first half of this century, noted a Booklist reviewer. A School Arts reviewer wrote that the book “marks a significant addition to the literature on American art and master drawings.”

Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman is Barter’s catalog of the 1998 Art Institute of Chicago exhibit by the same name. It contains over one hundred color plates and three hundred illustrations and pictures, including a selection of works by Cassatt’s teachers, family photographs, and other personal and historical items. Andrew Walker, George T.M. Shackelford, Erica E. Hirshler, Kevin Sharp, and Harriet Stratis are the other eight contributors of essays that detail Cassatt’s influence on the art world, her style, and her relationship with her mentor, Edgar Degas.

Cassatt was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1844. She began to show her work in Paris in 1874, moving within a group of French Impressionists. Cassatt used mothers and women as subjects, and her work is notable for her use of pastels. Andrea Barnet wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Barter’s book “expands upon what has been a limited, sentimentalized view of Cassatt.” Library Journal reviewer Mary Hamel Schwulst called Barter’s essay, “Mary Cassatt: Themes, Sources and the Modern Woman,” the “standout essay” and said the book is “essential.”

American Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I is the first catalog of the collection of American art housed at the institute. Over two hundred color illustrations and more than one hundred duotone images are supplemented by Barter’s introduction to the collection and its development and 150 essays by other contributors. Photographs of the paintings of Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Lorado Taft, and others are included, as well as pictures of silver and glass objects and furniture from the colonial period to the twentieth century.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 1988, review of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Wadsworth Atheneum, p. 1468.

Library Journal, January, 1999, Mary Hamel Schwulst, review of Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, p. 90.

New York Times Book Review, November 1, 1998, Andrea Barnet, review of Mary Cassatt, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, March 11 1988, review of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Wadsworth Atheneum, p. 92.

School Arts, May, 1988, review of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Wadsworth Atheneum, p. 43.*