R. Tripp Evans
Grant Wood: A Life
Knopf, October 2010
Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915
University of Texas Press, 2004
Tripp Evans teaches American art and architecture at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and has taught as a visiting lecturer at Wellesley, Brown, and Yale. He received his undergraduate degree in architectural history from the University of Virginia in 1990, and completed his Ph.D. in art history at Yale in 1997. To date his work has focused on notions of national character in American art and architecture -- the more fraudulent, the better -- from U.S. explorers' intentional misrepresentations of the pre-Columbian past, to the presumably patriotic canvases of the painter Grant Wood (today known primarily for his iconic 1930 oil, American Gothic). Evans and his partner live in a former Providence iron foundry known as the New England Butt Company; the factory's unusual history and its site's historical intersections with the American industrial, colonial-era, and pre-contact past are the subject of his next project, Three Acres of Providence.
photograph by Carl Keitner
