Holland Cotter

Holland Cotter (born 1947), is an American writer and co-chief art critic with The New York Times. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Life and work Cotter was born in Connecticut, United States, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. degree in 1970 from Harvard College, where he studied English literature under poet Robert Lowell and was an editor of the Harvard Advocate literary magazine. His first art course was an anthropology course on primitive art, which led to his first of many visits to Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He has been a writer and editor for the New York Arts Journal, Art in America, and Art News. he is credited with exposing contemporary Indian and Chinese art to a Western audience. Among his Pulitzer-winning pieces were ones written as a result of a trip to China prompted by the 2008 Summer Olympics, including an examination of the Chinese museum scene and an account of art at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang.