Kornwolf, James D.

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KORNWOLF, James D.

PERSONAL: Born in WI. Education: University of Illinois, B.F.A.; University of Wisconsin, M.A.; attended Courtauld Institute of Art; University of London, Ph.D. (art history).

ADDRESSES: Office—College of William and Mary, Department of Art and Art History, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795. E-mail—jdkorn@wm.edu.

CAREER: Educator, author, and art historian. Instructor at Rollins College and New Jersey Institute of Technology; College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, professor of art history, 1968-c. 2002, then emeritus. Lecturer at colleges and universities.

AWARDS, HONORS: Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division award, 2002, for Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America.

WRITINGS:

A History of American Dwellings, Rand McNally (Chicago, IL), 1967.

M. H. Ballie Scott and the Arts and Crafts Movement: Pioneers of Modern Design, Johns Hopkins Press (Baltimore, MD), 1972.

(Editor) Modernism in America 1937-1941: A Catalog and Exhibition of Four Architectural Competitions: Wheaton College, Goucher College, College of William and Mary, Smithsonian Institution, Joseph and Margaret Muscarelle Museum of Art (Williamsburg, VA), 1985.

So Good a Design: The Colonial Campus of the College of William and Mary: Its History, Background, and Legacy, College of William and Mary/Joseph and Margaret Muscarelle Museum of Art (Williamsburg, VA), 1989.

(With Georgiana W. Kornwolf) Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America, three volumes, John Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2002.

Contributor of articles and book reviews to periodicals.

Contributor to museum exhibition catalogues.

SIDELIGHTS: A native of Wisconsin, James D. Kornwolf developed a love of the arts from an early age; this love evolved into a career as an art history professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he arrived in 1968. Kornwolf's interest in historic architecture has resulted in several books on that subject.

The exhibition catalog So Good a Design: The Colonial Campus of the College of William and Mary: Its History, Background, and Legacy, authored by Kornwolf, was compiled to accompany a show about the history of the historic campus. Another catalogue, Modernism in America 1937-1941: A Catalog and Exhibition of Four Architectural Competitions: Wheaton College, Goucher College, College of William and Mary, Smithsonian Institution, was edited by Kornwolf and shows America's shift away from traditionalist to modernist building design.

The most ambitious of Kornwolf's books, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America, consists of three volumes and encompasses the history of architecture in North America. The series was praised by Paul Glassman in a review for Library Journal as "very likely the most informative source on colonial architecture of North America in print," although Glassman faulted some of the photographs illustrating the text as "flat and poorly lit." Praising Kornwolf for demonstrating a "thorough grasp of the political and economic context of urban form," Glassman dubbed the work a "magnum opus." A reviewer for Atlantic Monthly praised Architecture and Town Planning in America as groundbreaking, "a monument of scholarly publishing," and "a remarkable work of both art history and social history."

In an interview for the College of William and Mary online newsletter Flat Hat, Kornwolf commented on the narrow definition many people assign to "art": that it consists mainly of paintings and sculptures in museums. "It's so much more than that—art has a direct influence on the environmental and social aspects of our world," the historian stated. "Architecture is responsible for the cities and towns in the country. People need to start viewing the entire city as a work of art and not just the buildings in it."