Dianne Hauserman Pilgrim (1941 – December 2, 2019) was an American art historian and museum professional.

Early life

Dianne DeGlow Hauserman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of John Martin Hauserman and Norma Goodwin Bloom Hauserman. She graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1963. She earned a master's degree at the

New York University Institute of Fine Arts The Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) of New York University is dedicated to graduate teaching and advanced research in the history of art, archaeology and the conservation and technology of works of art. It offers Master of Arts and Doctor of Philoso ...

, with a 1965 master's thesis on museum professional

John Cotton Dana John Cotton Dana (born August 19, 1856, in Woodstock, Vermont – died July 21, 1929, in Newark, New Jersey) was an American library and museum director who sought to make these cultural institutions relevant to the daily lives of citizens. As ...

Career

Pilgrim held research and curatorial positions at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, the Finch College Museum of Art, and the

Brooklyn Museum of Art The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Cro ...

. In 1988, Pilgrim became director of the

Cooper Hewitt Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile (New York City), Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that fall under the ...

of Decorative Arts and Design. During her tenure as director, the Cooper Hewitt's historic buildings underwent a major renovation and expansion, with wheelchair accessibility as a high priority.

Universal design Universal design is the design of buildings, products or environments to make them accessible to people, regardless of age, disability or other factors. It addresses common barriers to participation by creating things that can be used by the ma ...

was also a theme in the museum's exhibits during her directorship. She retired from the Cooper Hewitt in 2000. Pilgrim was the co-author of ''The Machine Age in America: 1918-1941'' (1986, with

Richard Guy Wilson Richard Guy Wilson (born 1940) is a noted architectural historian and Commonwealth Professor in Architectural History at the University of Virginia. Wilson was born and raised in Los Angeles (residing in a house designed by Rudolph Schindler). H ...

and Dickran Tashjian) and ''The American Renaissance 1876-1917'' (1979, with Richard Guy Wilson and Richard N. Murray), both for the Brooklyn Museum. She also wrote exhibition catalogs, including ''The Power of Maps'' (1993) for the Cooper Hewitt and ''American Impressionist and Realist Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz'' (1973) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Personal life

Dianne Hauserman married fellow curator James Frederick Pilgrim in 1968; they divorced in 1978. Dianne Pilgrim described herself as having dyslexia, and she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late 1970s. She used a cane, crutches, and a wheelchair. "I used to kill myself walking from my car to my office without the wheelchair," she told an interviewer in 1987. "But I finally realized that I had to save my energy for the important things in life." She died in 2019, aged 78 years, in New York City.

Publications

* ''American Impressionist and realist paintings and drawings from the collection of Mr. & Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 19 April through 3 June 1973'', 1973 * ''An American dream : (letter from Washington)'', 1980 * ''Eighteenth century American interiors'', 1982 * ''The machine age in America, 1920-1941 : prospectus for an exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum, Fall 1985'', 1983 * ''The American Renaissance : decorative arts and interior design from 1876 to 1917''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pilgrim, Dianne H. 1941 births 2019 deaths American art historians Women art historians American art curators American women curators Pennsylvania State University alumni New York University Institute of Fine Arts alumni People with multiple sclerosis Wheelchair users People from Cleveland 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American women writers Historians from Ohio 21st-century American women