Diana Korzenik

Diana Korzenik (born March 15, 1941) is an American artist, educator, author, collector, and benefactor.

Early life and education

Diana Korzenik was born March 15, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, to father Harold, a labor lawyer, and mother Lillian, a fashion designer who, on behalf of nonprofit organizations, solicited and auctioned off the works of rising artists. Lillian encouraged Diana and her sister Ruth (Korzenik) Franklin (1935–2000), who would go on to become curator of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, to refine their art interests and practices.

In 1948 Harold Korzenik arranged for seven-year-old Diana to meet Anna Mary Robertson Moses (commonly known as Grandma Moses), who gave the girl a small painting of a New England white clapboard house. In 2015 Korzenik donated that painting to the Bennington Museum along with her own “Bennington House” (1965), thereby belatedly fulfilling a promise to reciprocate Moses's gift. The two paintings were exhibited side by side in the 2017 Bennington Museum–Shelburne Museum exhibit “Grandma Moses: American Modern”. Korzenik's “Anna Mary Robertson Moses: Rethinking Self-Taught” was included in the exhibition catalog, Grandma Moses: American Modern (Skira Rizzoli Publications, 2016).

Korzenik studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and at Vassar College (1957–59), where she met her chief mentor, Rosemarie Beck Rosemarie Beck, as well as at Yale Norfolk Art School, and the New York Studio School.

Korzenik graduated from Oberlin College (B.A., 1961). Thereafter, she studied art history at Columbia and taught for five years at an East Harlem public school, which deepened her curiosity about how and why children create art. She went on to study the psychology of art under Rudolf Arnheim at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, earning an Ed.D. in 1972.

In 1985, the University Press of New England published Korzenik's Drawn to Art: A Nineteenth-Century American Dream (University Press of New England, 1985), which demonstrates how a state law mandating public art education energized the Massachusetts economy and enriched the visual culture of nineteenth-century America. The book received the Boston Globe’s L. L. Winship Award in 1986.

In Objects of American Art Education (Huntington Library, 2004), which received the American Library Association's Leab Award in 2005, Korzenik contextualized the tangible as well as philosophical evidence of America's democratizing art enterprise, a book that grew out of the Huntington's acquisition of her professional teaching collection of Art Education Books and Ephemera. Assembled over 30 years and encompassing more than 1,000 artifacts—drawing desks and cards, tracing slates, paper-weaving kits, blocks, stencils, paint boxes, geometric forms, and approximately 450 instructional and theoretical books

For the benefit of other researchers, Korzenik has donated the Cross Family Archive to the American Antiquarian Society, the Mabel Spofford Collection to the Cape Ann Museum, her correspondence to and from Rudolf Arnheim to the Smithsonian Institution, Drawn to Art research materials to the New Hampshire Historical Society, and painted, large-plate tintype portraits to Historic New England.

In 1994, Korzenik founded the Friends of the Longfellow House to help promote and support the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Collections Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Bennington Museum and Ventfort Hall, in Lenox, Massachusetts.