Adrienne Baxter Bell

Adrienne Baxter Bell is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the College Honors Program at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She received her B.A. in Art History from Smith College, her M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, and her M. Phil. and Ph.D. degrees (the latter with distinction) in American art history from Columbia University. In addition to her dissertation (“George Inness: Painting Philosophy”), she is the author of George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (Braziller, 2003), a book that accompanied an exhibition that she curated for the National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum) in New York and the San Diego Museum of Art in 2003-04. Her second book on Inness, for which she served as the editor, is George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy (Braziller, 2006). Her recent scholarly publications include an essay on the philosophy of landscape representation by the American painter and theorist Asher B. Durand for Pittura Americana del XIX secolo: Atti del convegno (Treviso: Linea d’ombra Libri, 2008). She has received numerous grants and fellowships for her work in American art and social history, including the Sheila and Richard J. Schwartz Fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. In 2009, she received a Sokol Grant from Marymount to work on a book that explores how a kindred adaptation of the languages of spirituality and psychology helped to shape the visual vocabularies of late-nineteenth-century American landscape painters and European modernists.