Carol Wald

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Carol Wald

Carol Wald

Carol Wald Description

Carol Wald’s (1935-2000) formative years were spent feeding an unquenchable thirst for art history. 
Growing up in Detroit, she developed a love of the picaresque, manifested in paintings that evoked the beauty that lay beyond the grim reality of her northern industrial city.  As a young summer boarder in the farms and fields surrounding Michigan and Wisconsin, Wald spent hours tirelessly honing her painter’s hand.  She would hand out cards introducing herself as “a student wanting to become an artist,” offering to paint neighbors and pets for five dollars a piece.  At a local art store she completed quick studies for tips while her periodic art-show winnings enabled her to paint for months.  

After excursions to England and Holland Wald arrived in New York and became a successful graphic artist, contributing regularly to such publications as the New York Times, Viva, New
York, Ms., and Saturday Review.  She returned to acrylic work in the 1980s, garnering major solo exhibitions at the Kennedy Galleries.   In 1990 she moved to Canada and set up a small
studio in Burlington, Ontario where she undertook her most evocative series of psychoanalytical works until her untimely death at the age of sixty-five.
Through her visual and psychological references to an older, more spiritually complex world, Carol Wald presents a sequence of images that form a cumulative perception of reality – each painting “one frame of a motion picture transporting us on a journey through time.”

Carol S. Wald (January 21, 1935 – September 8, 2000) 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.


In the 1980s, a class reunion organizer for Cass Tech put her in touch with fellow alumnus, the filmmaker Hermann Tauchert. They had actually met in high school 25 years earlier, when they dated each other's friends. Romance bloomed and for two or three years, they conducted a long-distance love affair, with Tauchert in Detroit and Wald in New York. But finally in 1986, Wald moved back to Detroit and they married.

In 1990, worried about the high levels of crime in Detroit, they moved to Burlington, Ontario.

In 1997, Wald was diagnosed with cancer; three years later, she died in the Ian Anderson House, Oakville, on September 8, 2000.

The Cranbrook Academy of Art, located just outside Detroit, is the repository of Wald's collections and writings.

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