Judith E. Stein

Judith E. Stein (born 1943) is a Philadelphia-based art historian and curator, whose academic career has focused on the postwar New York art world. She has written a biography of the art dealer Richard Bellamy, as well as feature articles regarding artists including Jo Baer, Red Grooms, Lester Johnson, Alfred Leslie and Jay Milder.

Career Stein earned a B.A. in Art History from Barnard College, New York City in 1965, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 1967 and 1981, respectively. She studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London from 1967 to 1968.

Between 1983 and 1995, Stein served as Contemporary Curator for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where she organized traveling mid-career surveys for Red Grooms and Horace Pippin, a site-specific installation by Bettye Saar; as well as exhibitions for Tom Butter, Louise Fishman, Mike Glier, Lois Lane, Ray Metzker, Pepon Osorio, Judy Pfaff, Jody Pinto, Raymond Saunders, Joyce Scott, Judith Shea and Toshiko Takaezu. In 1994, she received a Pew Foundation Fellowship in the Arts in literary non-fiction for her art writing and was a scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. The International Art Critics Association awarded her book I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin Best Exhibition Catalog for 1995.

Her exhibition Jules Olitski, An Inside View: A Survey of Prints, 1954-2007 (2008), which Stein curated for the Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, VT, traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngtown, OH; and Everson Art Museum, Syracuse, NY. I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin (1993), which she curated for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, IL; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY. "Red Grooms: A Retrospective 1956-1984" (1985), which she curated for PAFA, traveled to Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, TN and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, NY.

Stein has contributed essays to Grandma Moses in the Twenty-First Century (2001), Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century (1998), The Power of Feminist Art (1995), Jacob Landau: Old Man Mad About Drawing, I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin, Figurative Fifties: New York Figurative Expressionism