Amy Wallace

Biography

Dr. Amy Wallace is an art historian and curator who specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art with a focus on the intersections of art and the environment during this period. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2019. Her dissertation, entitled “Studio of Nature: The Transformation of Artists’ Studios, 1845–1910,” examined the impact of artists’ changing relationship to nature on studios in Britain, France, and the United States from the advent of Realism to the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century. A second area of Dr. Wallace’s research is the status and representation of women artists in Canada. In 2013 she co-authored an article with Dr. Joyce Zemans on this subject that used quantitative and qualitative methods to examine gender disparity in exhibitions, acquisitions, prizes, and funding for the visual arts. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. She recently curated The Artist’s Dream: Works of French Symbolism (Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2020). The exhibition explored dreaming as a metaphor for artistic vision during the Symbolist movement in France. She is currently developing other curatorial projects focused on nineteenth-century art in Europe and North America.

Selected Publications

Wallace, Amy C. “Vehicles of Truth: Portable Studios and Nineteenth-Century British Landscape Painting.” In British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges and Responses since the Industrial Revolution, edited by Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède, 27–42. London: Routledge, 2021.

Wallace, Amy C. “The Women Artists of French Symbolism.” AGH Magazine, April 28, 2020, http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com/the-women-artists-of-french-symbolism/.

Wallace, Amy C. The Artist’s Dream: Works of French Symbolism. Hamilton: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2020. Exhibition brochure.

Zemans, Joyce, and Amy C. Wallace. “Where are the Women? Updating the Account!” RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review XXXVIII, no. 1 (2013): 1–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42630878.

Exhibitions

The Artist’s Dream: Works of French Symbolism, Art Gallery of Hamilton, February 1, 2020–January 10, 2021. Featuring works by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Auguste Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugène Carrière, Jeanne Jacquemin, Camille Claudel, Félix Vallotton, Édouard Vuillard, and others.

Recent Presentations

“La chambre obscure du monde: Inside Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio,” Universities Art Association of Canada Annual Conference, Québec City, October 24–27, 2019.

“The Soil and the Soul: The Nature of the Arts and Crafts Workshop at Rose Valley,” Communal Studies Association Annual Conference, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, October 17–19, 2019.

“Invisible Walls: Glass Studios and Naturalism in England and France, 1875–1900,” Invisible Spectrum: Making and Viewing the Unseen, University of Virginia Art & Architectural History Graduate Symposium, Charlottesville, March 29, 2019.

“Crystal Worlds: Glass Studios and the Illusion of Light, 1875–1900,” Context and Meaning XVIII: Pay Attention, Queen’s University Art History & Art Conservation Graduate Student Conference, Kingston, February 1, 2019.

“Direct from Nature: Elbridge Kingsley and Original Wood Engraving in the United States,” Nineteenth Century Studies Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia, March 15–17, 2018.

“Vehicles of Truth: Portable Studios and Nineteenth-Century British Landscape Painting,”Art and the Environment in Britain, 1700–today, Université Rennes 2, March 2–3, 2017.

“Virginia Woolf’s Asheham House (1912–1919) and the Dialectic of Light and Dark,” Bay Area Graduate Symposium in Art History, Film & Media Studies, Stanford University, November 14, 2015.