Carol Wald

Who was Carol Wald?

Carol S. Wald was an American artist who was also widely known for her talents as an illustrator. Her collages and paintings appeared in Time, Fortune, and Ms, and on the covers of Business Week, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Saturday Review.

Carol Wald was born in Detroit, Michigan, where she began studying art at age twelve. At age sixteen, while still a student at Detroit's Cass Technical High School, her talent was recognized by mayor Albert Cobo, and in 1954 she was awarded a four year scholarship at the Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. In 1960, the Detroit Institute of Arts purchased one of her paintings, "Children On Stilts". In 1963, she studied under Ben Shahn at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine, and in 1967 she studied at the Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1964 she was given a ten-year retrospective exhibition at the Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, Michigan.

By 1970 the National Gallery of Art and the Minnesota Museum of American Art had each purchased paintings by her for their permanent collections. She left Detroit for New York City in 1971, where she emerged as one of the nation's top illustrators. In 1975 she was awarded a gold medal for editorial illustration from the Society of Illustrators in New York. In 1976, she was commissioned by the Ford administration to paint America's official Bicentennial painting, which is on display at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.