Nell Painter

Nell Painter was born into segregation at the Houston Hospital for Negroes in 1942. If her family hadn’t relocated to Oakland, California, when she was a few weeks old, Texas’s Jim Crow laws would have dictated where she could go to school, the library, the pool. Family trips in the countryside would be out of the question—too dangerous. Not so out West, Painter recalls in her recent memoir, Old in Art School. “My parents drove us around California with the abandon of southerners finally allowed the freedom of the out-of-doors that had been denied them in the South.”

Now retired from a distinguished career as a Princeton University historian and author of a number of influential books, Painter has traveled the world. In the summers, when her New Jersey home is too