Biography

Jochen Wierech is the Lena E.S, Meijer Professor in Art History. Before joining the Art Department as a full-time faculty member, he also served as Curator of Sculpture at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.  He studied Art History and American Studies at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and received his Ph.D. in American Studies at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.  His teaching appointments in art history include Vanderbilt University, Whitman College, Free University in Berlin, and Belmont University. As a museum professional he has worked at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, and the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.  In addition to a Terra Foundation Senior Visiting Fellowship in Berlin, Wierich had pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution as well as Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. His publications include two books published by Penn State Press: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting (2012) and Internationalizing the History of American Art: Views (2009), an anthology co-edited with Barbara Groseclose.  His essays cover a range of topics and artists in American art, including Richard Caton Woodville, Lilly Martin Spencer, Emanuel Leutze, Winslow Homer, the Taos Society of Artists, The Eight, Winold Reiss, and Plantation images in the American South.  Areas of research interest are contemporary sculpture, historiography of American art, museum studies, art of the American West and American South, ethnography in art.  

Selected Publications

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware and American History Painting (Penn State Press, 2012)

Internationalizing American Art History: Views. Co-editor with Barbara Groseclose.  (Penn State Press, 2009).

“’War Spirit at Home’: Lilly Martin Spencer, Domestic Painting, and Artistic Hierarchy,” Winterthur Portfolio (Spring 2002).

Chief Editor and Contributing Author, Picturing Mississippi, 1817-2017: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise, exhibition catalogue (Mississippi Museum of Art and University of Mississippi Press, 2017).

Chief Editor and Contributing Author, Jaume Plensa: Human Landscape, exhibition catalogue (Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art, 2015).

“Woodville and the Düsseldorf School” in New Eyes on America: Richard Caton Woodville, exhibition catalogue (The Walters Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2013), 39-50.

“Against the Current: Washington Crossing the Delaware and the End of History Painting,” in The Düsseldorfer School of Painting and Its International Influence, 1819 –1918. Bettina Baumgärtel, ed., (Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, 2011).