In April of 2001 the University of Minnesota Foundation and Elizabeth S. Blake announced the establishment of a University of Minnesota Morris Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Liberal Arts, to be awarded for the first time when sufficient funds became available. The Visiting Professorship is made possible by combining a future legacy gift with a Foundation “match” and with designated endowment income and contributions.
Platt family collection.
The painter Alethea Hill Platt spent the first half of her life in comfortable obscurity, painting for her own pleasure in a Greenwich Village town house. But in the 1890s, she was forced out of her home and scrambled for income. She nimbly reinvented herself as a fixture on the Manhattan art scene.
Fig. 1.
The Maine Coast by Alethea Hill Platt (1860– 1932), c. 1918. Signed “Alethea H. Platt” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 14 by 18 inches.
Photograph courtesy of Skinner, Inc.
She joined forces with women painters organizing exhibitions nationwide. She won acclaim for a kind of Ashcan school take on rural scenery in Europe and the United States, depicting fishermen, farmers, and craftspeople laboring in dimly lit cabins or outdoors by moonlight. The