Holland Cotter (born 1947)[1] is an art critic with the New York Times. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts.[1] He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, where he studied English literature under poet Robert Lowell and was an editor of the Harvard Advocate literary magazine.[1][2] His first art course was an anthropology course on primitive art, which led to his first of many visits to Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.[2]
Cotter earned an MA in American modernism from the City University of New York in 1990 and a M. Phil in early Indian Buddhist art from Columbia in 1992, where he also taught Indian art and Islamic art.[1][3] He has been a writer and editor for the New York Arts Journal, Art in America, and Art News.[1]
Cotter was a freelance writer for the New York Times from 1992 to 1997 before being hired as a full time art critic in 1998.[1] Specifically hired for his expertise in Asian art,[4] he is credited with exposing contemporary Indian and Chinese art to a Western audience. Among his Pulitzer-winning pieces were ones written as a result of a trip to China prompted by the 2008 Summer Olympics, including an examination of the Chinese museum scene and an account of art at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang.[4]
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