Suzanne Hinman holds a Ph.D. in American art history and has been a curator, gallerist, museum director, professor, and an art model. She owned an art gallery in Santa Fe and then served as director of galleries at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the world's largest art school. Her interest in the artists and architects of the American Gilded Age and the famed Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire grew while associate director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The author continues to reside near Cornish as an independent scholar.Hinman's latest new book is The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York.
From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: Why did you decide to write this book about the second Madison Square Garden, and why do you see it as "the grandest"?Visit Suzanne Hinman's website.
A: It is so difficult to answer this question because it was so long ago that I was both captivated and captured by the subject matter—I truly can barely remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed by this Madison Square Garden and its creators.
Likely it began when I first came to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley as associate director of the Hood Museum of Art and learned about the nearby home and studio of one of America’s finest sculptors, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park.
I fell in love with his beautiful 1893 goddess Diana, a half-sized version installed at the park. And when I learned its home had originally been the Garden designed by Stanford White, one of my favorite architects with a fascinating if troubled private life as well, I...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: The Grandest Madison Square Garden.
The Page 99 Test: The Grandest Madison Square Garden.
--Marshal Zeringue