Sylvia Ardyn Boone, Art History

Sylvia Ardyn Boone (PhD ’79) was a scholar of art history, African art, and the use of female imagery in art. She was hired as a visiting lecturer in the Afro-American Studies department in 1970, where she taught a seminar entitled “The Black Woman” conceptualized by Vera Wells (BA ’71) and organized the Chubb Conference on the Black Woman in her first year. While at Yale in this capacity, Boone became interested in and entered the MA-PhD program in History of Art, winning the Blanshard Prize for her 1979 dissertation, “Sowo Art in Sierra Leone: The Mind and Power of Woman on the Plane of the Aesthetic Disciplines.” She was appointed to the Department of History of Art after the completion of her dissertation, and in 1988 Boone became the first black woman to receive tenure at Yale.

Notable works by Boone include West African Travels: A Guide to Peoples and Places (1974) and Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (1986). She served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, and as vice president and scholarships chair of the Roothbert Fund of New York City. In 2001, a weeklong program celebrating her life and work was held at Yale, culminating in the revealing of a portrait of Boone in Timothy Dwight College.  The Sylvia Arden Boone Prize, jointly administered by the History of Art and African American Studies departments, has been granted annually since 1996 for exceptional student work on African or African American art.

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Profile by Sarah Babinski, PhD candidate in Linguistics