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August 19, 1998
RELEASE ON RECEIPT
Sharon
Patton Appointed Director of Allen Memorial Art Museum at
Oberlin College
Media
Contact: Marci
Janas
OBERLIN, OHIO --Sharon F. Patton has been named the John G. W. Cowles Director of Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM). She will begin her tenure as the Museum's new director--and as professor of art--on October 19. Her appointment, which follows a nationwide search, was announced last week by Nancy S. Dye, President of Oberlin College.
"I think that in Sharon Patton, Oberlin has found the ideal director for the Allen Memorial Art Museum," said President Dye. "She combines the scholarly training and abilities of an excellent art historian with proven administrative interests and abilities. Her understanding of academic museums and academic institutions, and her exceptionally fine programmatic imagination, will be particularly effective in making the Museum accessible and inviting to a wide and diverse public&emdash;both inside and outside the College."
Patton, who replaces Anne Moore, is the ninth named director of the AMAM since its dedication in 1917. Marjorie E. Wieseman, who served as acting director following Moore's departure, will resume her prior duties as curator of Western art before 1850.
Patton's research interests focus on African-American and West African art. She has, since 1991, been associate professor of art history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and she has been the director of its Center for Afroamerican and African Studies since 1996. Her academic career spans three decades, and includes faculty appointments at the University of Maryland and the University of Houston. She was director of galleries at New Jersey's Montclair State College (University) from 1986 to 1988. From 1988 to 1991 she was chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Of the nearly 20 exhibitions Patton has organized, three that were mounted during her tenure at the Studio Museum in Harlem received considerable critical attention and acclaim: "Memory and Metaphor, the Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987"; "Home: Contemporary Urban Images by Black Photographers"; and "The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s." The latter was in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.
The major retrospective show of Bearden's work, in 1991, resulted in the publication of Patton's first book, Memory and Metaphor, the Art of Romare Bearden (Oxford University Press). Her new book, African-American Art, also from Oxford, was published this year.
In addition, Patton has authored numerous catalogues, articles, essays and book chapters. Her essay on three contemporary African-American women artists appears in African American Visual Aesthetics: A Postmodernist View (Smithsonian Press, 1995). Her newest book contribution, "A History of Collecting African-American Art," is forthcoming this fall in The David C. Driskell Collection: Narratives of African American Art of the Twentieth Century (San Francisco: Pomegranate Press).
Patton's numerous awards and grants include fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 1980, Patton earned her doctorate degree in art history at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of African art. Her master of arts degree in art history is from the University of Illinois (Urbana). She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in humanities and art studio from Roosevelt University in Chicago.
The Allen Memorial Art Museum is considered one of the finest college or university museums in the nation. Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting, European art of the late 19th and 20th centuries and contemporary art are especially well-represented among the more than 11,000 objects spanning the range of art history. Other notable collections include Japanese woodblock prints and Islamic carpets from Mary A. Ainsworth and Charles Martin Hall, respectively, and a comprehensive group of Old Master prints, including fine holdings of Rembrandt and Dürer.
Funding for the John G. W. Cowles Directorship of the Allen Memorial Art Museum is made possible through a bequest from the estate of Cowles's daughter, Beatrice Cowles de Coudekerque. Born in Oberlin in 1836, John Guiteau Welch Cowles received his AB from Oberlin College in 1856, his AM from the Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1859, and an honorary LL.D. from the College in 1898. He was the first President of Cleveland Trust Co. (now Ameritrust), from 1895 to 1903. Cowles served on the Oberlin College Board of Trustees from 1874 to 1914; in 1902, upon the death of President John Henry Barrows, he became acting President of the College.
