Sunday, September 21, 2008

Dallas Museum of Art promotes Heather MacDonald to associate curator of European art

By Pegasus News wire

Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, announced that Heather MacDonald has been promoted to the position of The Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art, effective immediately.

“On behalf of the DMA Board of Trustees, it is with great pleasure that we announce Heather MacDonald’s promotion, as she has been an integral part of our curatorial team,” said Pitman. “Over the past three years, Heather has contributed to our ambitious exhibition program and recommended excellent acquisitions. We are very pleased to acknowledge her scholarship, leadership and passion for art with this promotion naming her Associate Curator.”

Since joining the DMA in 2005 as The Lillian and James H. Clark Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MacDonald has served on the curatorial team for two of the Museum’s most acclaimed and ambitious European art exhibitions.

She was a coordinating curator of J.M.W. Turner, organized by Tate Britain, the National Gallery of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007-08), and served as one of the curators of the first exhibition jointly presented at the DMA and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Baltimore Museum of Art (2007-08). Along with MacDonald, the curatorial team for Matisse included Dorothy Kosinski, former Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art; Steven A. Nash, former Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center; Jay Fisher, Baltimore Museum of Art Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; with the assistance of Jed Morse, Assistant Curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center; and Oliver Shell, Baltimore Museum of Art Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and a Kress Foundation Fellow.

MacDonald has also curated two focused exhibitions, A Painting in the Palm of Your Hand: Eighteenth-Century Painted Fans from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection (2007), and in 2006, Beyonsense: The Russian Avant-garde and the Remaking of the Illustrated Book, 1913-1920.

Most recently, she successfully proposed the DMA’s acquisition of Jacques-Louis David’s dramatic painting Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe through the Mrs. John B. O’Hara Fund of the Foundation for the Arts. One of David’s earliest works, it is a significant addition to the Museum’s collection of 18th-century European art.

MacDonald came to the Dallas Museum of Art three years ago from the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Garden in San Marino, Calif., where she was a research assistant in the French art collections, with a specific focus on 18th-century French painting, sculpture and decorative art.

MacDonald earned her doctorate and master of arts in the history of art from the University of California, Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation on landscape and political culture in the paintings of the 18th-century French artist Claude Joseph Vernet.

Source: Dallas Museum of Art

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