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Joan Mondale
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Joan Adams Mondale (born August 8, 1930), is the wife of Walter Mondale, the 42nd Vice President of the United States and later U.S. ambassador to Japan. She is an advocate for the arts.
Joan Adams was born in Eugene, Oregon, and is one of three daughters of the Rev. John Maxwell Adams, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, the former Eleanor Jane Hall. She attended an integrated Quaker school in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, a public school in Columbus, Ohio and later St. Paul Academy and Summit School in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1952, she graduated from Macalester College, where her father served as chaplain. Following graduation from college, she worked at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, before returning to Minnesota, where she worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
She married Walter Mondale on
27 December 1955, several months after a
blind date. The couple has three children, a daughter, Eleanor, and two sons, Theodore and William.
During her husband's term as Vice President from 1977 to 1981, Mondale served as the Honorary Chairperson of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. In 1972, she wrote "Politics in Art", a book for young adults, and during her time at Number One Observatory Circle, the official vice presidential residence, Mondale made the house a showcase of American art, opening it for tours and decorating it with works by Robert Rauschenberg, Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson, Ansel Adams, and others. She also testified before Congress in an attempt to revise the estate tax to better benefit artists and their families.
Following her husband's defeat in the 1980 Vice Presidential race, the Mondales returned to Minnesota, living there until her husband's 1993 appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Japan. While in Japan from 1993 to 1996, she studied Japanese art.
In 1980, a tulip by Dutch breeder J. F. van der Berg, was named in her honor.
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