Lines of a Nation: Early American Drawings & Their Legacy

Stuart P. Feld is President and Director of Hirschl & Adler Galleries in New York. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1957, with a double major in art history and religion, and completed his graduate studies at Harvard University, earning an A.M. from the Fogg Art Museum and completing all doctoral coursework. Feld began his career at the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he rose to Associate Curator in Charge of the Department of American Painting and Sculpture. Since joining Hirschl & Adler in 1967, he has played a central role in shaping the study and market for American art and decorative arts from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. His scholarly interests encompass American painting, sculpture, furniture, silver, glass, and prints, with particular depth in American Neo-Classical decorative arts. Feld has authored and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and scholarly publications and has lectured widely at major museums and academic institutions in the United States.

Christina Michelon is the Pamela and Peter Voss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She specializes in the visual and material culture of the United States and received her PhD in art history from the University of Minnesota. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, Winterthur Museum & Library, Henry Luce Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Rare Book School’s Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, and others. She was also recently elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society, where she was previously a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in residence. Her writing has appeared in the journals Common-place, J19, New England Quarterly, Panorama, and in American Art, for which received the Frost Essay Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Christina was previously a curator of special collections at the Boston Athenaeum, where she lead the recent permanent collection reinstallation and several special exhibitions, including Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston—a collaboration between the Boston Athenaeum and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, accompanied by the catalogue Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood Liturgy, co-edited with Gardner Museum curator Diana Greenwald and distributed by Princeton University Press. Most recently for the MFA, Christina co-curated Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor, with Ethan Lasser (Chair, Art of the Americas).

Mark D. Mitchell is the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. He completed his doctorate at Princeton University in 2002 and previously worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Academy Museum, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and Princeton University Art Museum. His research interests in American art extend from the colonial period to the later twentieth century in all media, with particular depth in landscape and still life painting. His most recent exhibition was The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917.