Amei Wallach

Amei Wallach was raised in Goshen, Connecticut by German-Jewish immigrants.[3][4]

Wallach graduated from the George School, a private boarding high school, in Newton, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.[3] Wallach attended the University of Chicago, withdrew to pursue acting in New York, and completed her Bachelor of Science at the Columbia University School of General Studies.[5]

Wallach worked as Chief Art Critic for Newsday and New York Newsday from 1984 to 1995, and was an on-air arts essayist for the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, later renamed PBS NewsHour, from 1987 to 1995.[9][10] As an art critic, Wallach's articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Art in America, ARTnews, Aperture, Parkett and The Brooklyn Rail.[11][12]

Wallach has interviewed and profiled artists ranging from Salvador Dalí to Willem de Kooning. She profiled Anselm Kiefer in 1988, David Hammons in 1991, and in October 2001 Wallach's essay on the Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat was featured in Art in America.[13]

From 2000 to 2005, Wallach was president of AICA/USA, the U.S. Section of the International Association of Art Critics , or Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art, and as of 2020, continues on its board.[14] She also serves on the board of CEC ArtsLink, and was a founding member of ArtTable, an association of leading women in the arts.[15] Wallach is the founding director of The Art Writing Workshop; a partnership between the International Art Critics Association (AICA/USA) and the Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.[12][16]

In 2008 Wallach co-directed and co-produced Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine with Marion Cajori.[17] Filmed over 14 years (from 1993 to 2007), the work is a documentary portrait of the sculptor Louise Bourgeois and her career, which spanned the 20th and early 21st century. The New York Times called the film a "Superb documentary portrait", and it garnered a positive review from The Seattle Times.[18][19][20]

In 2013 Wallach directed Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here, which debuted at the New York Film Forum, and had its Canadian premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival.[21][22][23] Beginning in the Ukraine under Joseph Stalin, the film culminates in 2008 with the artists’ first public exhibition in Moscow, in venues throughout the city, including the Pushkin Museum.[24]

Her latest documentary film, Taking Venice: The Rauschenberg Factor, examines the United States' efforts to ensure that, through Robert Rauschenberg, the Golden Lion top prize of the 1964 Venice Biennale would go to America.[25]

In 1972, Wallach married Charles F. Tebo, who was a group product manager with Lever Brothers’ New York branch.[3] Her brother Wendell helped to officiate.[3] The marriage ended in divorce.[26]

Wallach married again in September 1989 to William P. Edwards, chief executive officer of the Museum Store Company, a gift store chain. This was a second marriage for both parties.[26]

Wendell Wallach, her brother, is a lecturer at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and chair of the technology and ethics study group.[27]

Wallach was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, later renamed the John S. Knight Fellowship, in 1984.[33][34]

In 2006, Wallach won a "Best Show in a Temporary or Alternative Space" award for her exhibition Neo-Sincerity: The Difference Between the Comic and the Cosmic Is a Single Letter, from the International Art Critics Association/USA.[35][36]