Hunter alumnus Holland Cotter (MA, Art History ’88) has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, “marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling.”

Cotter has been a staff art critic at the New York Times since 1998. Between 1992 and 1997 he was a regular freelance writer for the paper. During the 1980s he was a contributing editor at Art in America and an editorial associate at Art News. In the 1970s, he co-edited New York Arts Journal, a tabloid-format quarterly magazine publishing fiction, poetry, and criticism.

Art in New York City has been his regular weekly beat, which he has taken to include all five boroughs and most of the city’s art and culture museums. His subjects range from Italian Renaissance painting to street-based communal work by artist collectives. For the Times, he has written widely about “non-western” art and culture. In the 1990s, he introduced readers to a broad range of Asian contemporary art as the first wave of new art from China art was building and breaking. He helped bring contemporary art from India to the attention of a western audience.

Cotter was inducted into the Hunter Hall of Fame in 2005. He received an AB from Harvard College, where he studied poetry with Robert Lowell and was an editor of the Harvard Advocate. He later received an M. Phil in early Indian Buddhist art from Columbia University, where he studied Sanskrit and taught Indian and Islamic art.