John E. Wallace (1929–2011) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. After receiving a bachelor of fine arts in 1953 from Washington University, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1953–54), and Indiana University, where he received a master of fine arts degree in 1957. Wallace worked mostly with oil and acrylic paints and was a very successful painter. Although his work was featured in dozens of one-person exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions, his only documented fresco work is the panel he created at the South Solon Meeting House and for which he had received the Margaret Blake scholarship. In 1982, he became a member of the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. Over the years, he received a number of awards, including a Huntington Hartford Foundation Fellowship and a Roswell Museum Artist-in-Residence Grant. In 1968, Wallace began teaching, first at Prairie State College in Illinois from 1968 to 1979, where he was chairman of the department from 1971 to 1974. From 1981 through 2009 he was a professor in the Art Department at Western Connecticut State University, where he served as chair from 1987 through 1991 and was instrumental in the establishment of a master of fine arts program in Visual Arts.
—Mina Ekstrom
- “John E. Wallace Jr. 1929–2011.” The Litchfield County Times 20–29 April 2011.
- “John E. Wallace, 81, Was Artist, Professor.” CT Insider 20 April 2011.
- Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. “Alumni & Faculty Database.”
- The RAiR Foundation; RAiR 1968. “John Wallace.”