R. Tripp Evans

WINNER OF THE 2010 NATIONAL AWARD FOR ARTS WRITING

Tripp Evans is a Virginian by birth and Rhode Islander by adoption - hence his love for bourbon, Gothic storytelling, and stuffed quahogs. He majored in architectural history at the University of Virginia and received his Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. Since 1997 he has taught in the Art and Art History Department at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, specializing in American art and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Evans's books examine how and why American artists evoke national character in their work - from U.S. explorers' fanciful representations of the pre-Columbian past (Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915) to Grant Wood's deeply personal use of national iconography (Grant Wood: A Life). Biography – whether of nations, institutions, or individuals – is his favorite genre, and artists’ creative deception his greatest fascination.

In his most recent project, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, Evans takes these themes indoors. Exploring the private lives and spaces of four bachelor-designers – men inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “gospel of beauty” and driven by private compulsions – this book reveals the complicated depths beneath their homes’ brilliant surfaces.