Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton professor emerita of history, was 67 years old when she enrolled as an MFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design. During her second year there her book The History of White People was released and would become a New York Times bestseller. It was disorienting event, as she describes it. On one hand, there was the elation of receiving laudatory reviews, and on the other, the ever-present, stinging criticisms she experienced in art school, which she calls “one long tearing down.”
Her latest book, Old in Art School, describes her late-in-life journey from preeminent historian to painter.
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