In addition to running the Trading Post in Kotzebue, Alaska, Ruth was influential in local politics and an avid historian, naturalist, and adventurer. She earned a degree in Biology and was one of University of Alaska Fairbanks’ first Inupiaq graduates. Ruth and her family were a critical support for the Archaelogical work conducted in Kobuk Valley National Park by Louis Giddings and Doug Anderson. She had a passion for history and the heritage of the Iñupiat.
First woman museum curator at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum
Irish-English writer, feminist, and art historian
One of the first individuals to receive gender-affirming surgery in the United States, Simmons was also well-known in Charleston society for her marriage to John Paul Simmons. Theirs was reportedly the first documented interracial marriage in South Carolina.
Scholar and catalogues raisonnés compiler; dealer of eighteenth-century French art; director of the Galerie Cailleux from 1982-1996
Modernist art historian
Architectural historian and first permanent architecture critic for the New York Times.
First woman to direct a major American art museum (Baltimore Museum of Art)
Academic specialist in medieval Burgundian sculpture, particularly Claus Sluter, as well as medieval painting and illumination and costume studies.
Vassar Professor of Art and Director of the Vassar Art Gallery.