The Department of History and Art History has named Lee Glazer (B.A. Art History, 1984) as the recipient of its Distinguished Alumni Award. Dr. Glazer is associate curator of American art at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallert of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and is a specialist in late nineteenth-century American art and culture. After receiving her B.A. from George Mason in 1984, she went on to earn a master's in English literature from Yale University in 1987, and a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996.
Since coming to the Freer and Sackler Gallert in 2007, Lee has organized a number of exhibitions including Winslow Homer: Four Views of Nature; Seascapes; Tryon and Sugimoto; Chinamania: Whistler and the Victorian Craze for Blue-and-White Porcelain; and An American in London: Whistler and the Thames. She is the author of A Perfect Harmony: The American Collection in the Smithsonian's Freer Gallert of Art and co-editor of James McNeill Whistler in Context, East West Interchanges in American Art, and Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism. In 2011, she reinstalled Whistler's famous Peacock Room to its 1908 appearance, when its shelves were filled with Asian ceramics collected and arranged by museum founder Charles Lang Freer, and she is the author of the accompanying publication The Peacock Room Comes to America.
September 23, 2014