DESCRIPTION:
Carol Wald was born in Detroit, Michigan where she began studying art at age twelve. At age sixteen, while still a student at Cass Technical High School in Detroit, her talent was recognized by the mayor of Detroit, Albert Cobo, and in 1954 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 and 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.