Joni L. Kinsey received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1989 and joined the University of Iowa faculty in 1991. She teaches a variety of classes, ranging from surveys of visual culture in the United States to thematic courses on American landscape painting, American print culture, art of the American National Parks, art and regional perspectives on America, and museum theory and practice, and Native American art. Her research specialties include nineteenth-century landscape painting and art of the American West and Midwest, but her interests and research ranges widely, from nineteenth-century popular prints to the rise of women artists in the central U.S. She is the author of four books, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992; Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996; The Majestic Grand Canyon: 150 Years in Art, First Glance Books, 1998, and Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste (University Press of Kansas, 2006), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her most recent publication is “Triangulating the View: The Allied Arts of the Great Surveys,” in Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas, edited by Julia Rosenbaum and Ernest Capello. Routledge Press (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK), 35-59.  In 2014 Professor Kinsey was a Fulbright Fellow in the United Kingdom and she is continuing to work on a book and possible exhibition from that experience, entitled Thomas Moran’s Britain: Transatlantic Visions of “The American Turner.”  She lectures frequently at professional conferences, symposia, and museums. 

Professor Kinsey is also the curator of the Eve Drewelowe Collection, a remarkable corpus of hundreds of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and personal effects of Eve Drewelowe, who bequeathed the collection to the School of Art & Art History in the late 1980s. Drewelowe received the first Master of Arts in painting at the University of Iowa in 1924 and devoted her life to making art. Because she worked in a wide range of media, changed her style with the times, and wrote thoughtfully about her struggles and inspirations, her collection is a remarkably broad and rich representation of modern art and the issues that affected women artists in the twentieth century. One or two art history graduate students work with the collection as research assistants under Professor Kinsey’s supervision.

Awards

• Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, University of Nottingham, England
• Western Heritage Award, Outstanding Art Book Prize for Thomas Moran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste
• Eugene M. Kayden National Book Award for Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie

Selected publications

• Thomas Moran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas in association with the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha. 2006; revised edition 2013
• Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, New Directions in American Art series.
• Philip Guston and H.W. Janson: Modernism at the University of Iowa and Beyond
• “The Moran Collection at Gilcrease: Opportunities for New Understandings.” Online article, Gilcrease Museum.
• “Triangulating the View: The Allied Arts of the Great Surveys,” in Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas, edited by Julia Rosenbaum and Ernest Capello. Routledge Press (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK, 2020): 35-59.
• “Reality and Myths of the Wild West,” in Es War Einmal in Amerika (Once Upon a Time in America) (Cologne, Germany: Walraf-Richartz-Museum and Fondation Corboud, and Wienand Verlag, 2018): 83-89.
• “Cultivating Iowa: An Introduction to Grant Wood,” in Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic, edited by Jane Milosch, with Wanda Corn and James M. Dennis. (Munich and New York: Prestel Publishing, 2005): 11-36.

Lectures

• Grant Wood's Lithographs with Professor Joni Kinsey
• Grant Wood's 125th Birthday
• Iowa Modernism - Artists in Iowa: The First Century Exhibition Symposium
• "The Wylodean Saxon" Lecture with Joni L. Kinsey

Research interests

• American Art
• Landscape and environmental art
• Art of the American West
• American print culture
• American regionalism
• Native American art
• Women artists of the American Midwest and West

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