Mentor & Residency Hosts 2012

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design
The Museum of Modern Art
MENTOR: John Sexton, President, New York University
RESIDENCY: Arianna Huffington, President & Editor-in-Chief, Huffington Post Media Group

Andrea Bayer, Curator, Department of European Paintings
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
MENTOR: Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer, Philadelphia Museum of Art
RESIDENCY: Christopher Brown, Director, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford

Christa Clarke, Senior Curator, Arts of Africa and the Americas, and Curator, Arts of Africa
Newark Museum
MENTOR: Desai, President, Asia Society and Museum
RESIDENCY: Jock Reynolds, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Yale University Art Gallery

Thomas Denenberg, Director
Shelburne Museum
MENTOR: Anne Poulet, Director Emerita, The Frick Collection
RESIDENCY: William Griswold, Director, The Morgan Library and Museum

Leah Dickerman, Curator, Painting and Sculpture
The Museum of Modern Art
MENTOR: Matthew Teitelbaum, and Sonja Koerner Director, and CEO, Art Gallery of Ontario
RESIDENCY: Michael Govan, Director and Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Elizabeth Finch, Lunder Curator of American Art
Colby College Museum of Art
MENTOR: Kim Rorschach, Director, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
RESIDENCY: Julian Zugazagoitia, Director, Nelson-Atkins Museum

John Ravenal, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Virginia Museum of Fine Art
MENTOR: Lisa Phillips, Director, New Museum
RESIDENCY: Ann Philbin, Director, The Hammer Museum

Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director, Curatorial Affairs
Art Gallery of Ontario
MENTOR: Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director, Creative Time
RESIDENCY: Chris Dercorn, Director, Tate Modern

Martha Tedeschi, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints
Art Institute of Chicago
MENTOR: Tom Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums
RESIDENCY: John Leighton, Director-General, National Galleries of Scotland

Stanton Thomas, Curator of European and Decorative Art
Memphis Brooks Museum
MENTOR: Brian Kennedy, Director, Toledo Museum of Art
RESIDENCY: Eric Lee, Director, Kimbell Art Museum

Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Director of Collections and Exhibitions
Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture
MENTOR: Mary Sue Sweeney Price, Director, Newark Museum
RESIDENCY: Deyan Sudijc, Director, Design Museum, London

2012 Fellows

Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design
The Museum of Modern Art

Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design of The Museum of Modern Art where she has worked since 1994. She has lectured worldwide in settings ranging from peer conferences to global interdisciplinary gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has served on several international architecture and design juries. From 1991 to 1993, she was a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has in the past few years also taught design history and theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts in New York. A Contributing Editor for Domus magazine (1987‐91) and an editor of Abitare (1992‐94), Paola Antonelli is also the author of many exhibition catalogues and several titles dedicated to design. The recipient of a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1990, Paola Antonelli is a Senior Fellow with the Royal College of Art, London and received an Honorary Doctorate in Design from Kingston University, London, and from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. She also earned the “Design Mind” Smithsonian Institution’s National Design Award in October 2006, and in 2007 she was named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries by Time magazine.



Andrea Bayer
Curator, Department of European Paintings
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dr. Andrea Bayer was educated at Barnard College (Columbia University; class of 1978) and Princeton University, where she wrote a dissertation on the arts in Brescia in the early sixteenth century under the direction of Prof. John Shearman (PhD. 1990). She has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1989, first in the Department of Prints and Photographs and, from 1990, in the Department of European Paintings. There she has been involved in numerous exhibitions, including Jusepe de Ribera 1591-1652 (1992); Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1770 (1996); Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (1998-1999); The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis. The Music of Silence (2000-2001); Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (2004); Antonello da Messina: Sicily’s Renaissance Master (2005-2006); Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008- 2009); and most recently The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (2011). She has written extensively on north Italian painting of the Renaissance, including two Museum Bulletins on painting north of the Apennines (2003 and 2005), and a chapter on the arts of Brescia and Bergamo in Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance. Venice and the Veneto (ed. Peter Humfrey) (2007). Some of her lecturing in recent years has concentrated on collecting and connoisseurship, including a paper given last year on “Collecting North Italian Painting at the Metropolitan Museum” (The Frick Collection, Center for the History of Collecting in America, 2010). Dr. Bayer is also the Coordinating Curator for Curatorial Studies, the graduate program run by the Metropolitan Museum and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and was the Interim Head of the Department of Education at the Metropolitan Museum in 2009. She is currently at work on a group of special projects for the Director’s Office connected with the re-launch of the Museum’s website and other initiatives related to the visitor’s experience.


Christa Clarke
Senior Curator, Arts of Africa and the Americas, and Curator, Arts of Africa
The Newark Museum

Christa Clarke, a specialist in historic and contemporary African art, is Senior Curator, Arts of Africa and the Americas, and Curator, Arts of Africa, at the Newark Museum. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Maryland, writing her dissertation on the collecting and display of African art at the Barnes Foundation. Prior to her appointment at Newark in 2002, Clarke served as the Curator of African Art at the Neuberger Museum. She has been a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Clark Art Institute and held teaching appointments at George Washington University, the Corcoran School of Art, Rutgers University and Purchase College. At Newark, Clarke has organized several exhibitions, including Power Dressing: Men’s Fashion and Prestige in Africa (2005), Another Modernity: Works on Paper by Uche Okeke (2006), and Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art (2008). Her most recent publication, Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (2010; co-edited with Kathleen Berzock), examines the impact of museum practice on the formation of meaning and public perception of African art. Clarke is currently overseeing a major expansion and reinstallation of the African art galleries at Newark and an accompanying collections catalogue, a project which has received major support from the NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


Thomas Denenberg
Former Deputy Director and Chief Curator Portland Museum of Art
Incoming Director, Shelburne Museum

Thomas Denenberg is newly appointed as director of Shelburne Museum. Prior to moving to Vermont this fall, he held the position of Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Portland Museum of Art. A graduate of Bates College, he earned a doctorate in American Studies from Boston University. A specialist in the visual and material culture of New England, he has served as the William and Helen Thon Curator of American Art at the Portland Museum of Art, the Betsy Main Babcock Curator of American Art at Reynolda House, and the Richard Koopman Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum. He has taught American art and architecture at Boston University, Harvard, and Wake Forest. A frequent public lecturer, he is the author of Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place (2010), Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (2003) and edited and/or contributed to Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England (2009), Backstage Pass: Rock and Roll Photography (2009), Re-creating the American Past (2006), and Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (1999).



Leah Dickerman
Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture
The Museum of Modern Art

Leah Dickerman has been Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art since 2008. Before coming to MoMA, Dickerman was Acting Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2007), and Associate Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the NGA (2001-2007). Over her career, Dickerman has organized or co-organized a series of prizewinning multi-media exhibitions that offer new perspectives on the modern, including Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity (2009-2010), Dada (2005-2006), and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998). She is currently preparing the exhibitions Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (scheduled for November 2011) and Inventing Abstraction, 1912-1925 (scheduled for December 2012). Her scholarship on the historical avant-garde appears in a broad range of publications, and she has been on the editorial board of the journal October since 2001. Dickerman earned her doctorate in art history from Columbia University, and has held faculty teaching positions at Stanford University and the University of Delaware.


Elizabeth Finch
Lunder Curator of American Art
Colby College Museum of Art

Elizabeth Finch is the Lunder Curator of American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is an alumna of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Her areas of expertise include American art after 1945 and the medium of drawing. Prior to her current position she worked in the curatorial department at the Whitney Museum, at The Drawing Center, where she was assistant curator and then curator between 1994 and 2001, and as an independent curator. She is a recipient of an Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and her recent exhibitions include Art at Colby (2008), a museum-wide installation of the Colby Museum’s collection, Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break (2010), and Will Barnet: Drawings and Prints, the 1930s (2010). She is currently working with the architecture firm Frederick Fisher and Partners on Process and Place (2011), an exhibition on the design evolution of the Colby Museum’s future Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion.


John Ravenal
Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

John Ravenal is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a position he has held since 1998. Prior to that, he was Associate Curator of 20th-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ravenal recently curated Xu Bing: Tobacco Project which opened in September 2011 and travels to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in January 2012. Other recent projects at VMFA include Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit (2010); Jun Kaneko: Large Clay Works (2010); Chuck Close: People Who Matter to Me (2010), and the reinstallation of the 20th- and 21st-century galleries for the museum’s grand reopening in May 2010. Ravenal earned his BA in art history from Wesleyan University and his MA and MPhil in art history from Columbia University. He recently completed a two-year term as president of the Association of Art Museum Curators.



Elizabeth Smith
Executive Director, Curatorial Affairs
Art Gallery of Ontario

Elizabeth Smith is Executive Director, Curatorial Affairs, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Previously, she held the position of Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Programs at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and was Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

An internationally recognized art historian and museum professional, her curatorial work and writings have ranged broadly across visual art, public art, and architecture from mid-20th century to today. Among her exhibitions are Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, At the End of the Century: 100 Years of Architecture and monographic shows of artists including Jenny Holzer, Lee Bontecou, Kerry James Marshall, Roberto Matta, Catherine Opie, Donald Moffett, Cindy Sherman and Uta Barth.

Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also a trustee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.



Martha Tedeschi
Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings
Art Institute of Chicago

Martha Tedeschi is Curator, Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, a position she assumed in 1999. She holds degrees in art history from Brown University (B.A.), University of Michigan (M.A.), and Northwestern University (Ph.D.). A specialist in British and American art with a broad interest in the history of printmaking and drawing media, she is the general editor and co-author of the two-volume catalogue raisonné The Lithographs of James McNeill Whistler (1998), winner of the George Wittenborn Prize. Recent major book and exhibition projects for the Art Institute include Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light (2008) and its sequel, John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism (2011). Tedeschi directs the Art Institute’s Print and Drawing support group and internship program, and is a former chair of the museum’s Curators Forum. She is the current (2009-2013) President of the Print Council of America.



Stanton Thomas
Curator of European Paintings and Decorative Arts
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Stanton Thomas received his Ph. D. in the subject of Flemish Art from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Oho. As part of his program of study, he spent two years in Leuven, Belgium under the auspices of the Vlaamse Gemeenschap and the Belgian American Education Foundation. He also holds an M.A. from the University of Missouri, Columbia and a B.S. from Truman University. In addition, Dr. Thomas completed the Attingham Summer School Program in 2007.

After his graduation in 1998, Dr. Thomas was a visiting professor at Case Western for two years. He then held the post of Assistant Curator of Paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Currently Dr. Thomas is the Curator of European Paintings and Decorative Arts at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee.

Dr. Thomas resides in Memphis, Tennessee with his wife Geneviève Hill-Thomas. His spouse is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington in West African Art History.



Michelle Joan Wilkinson
Director of Collections and Exhibitions
Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture

Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Ph.D. is Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, where she serves as chief curator for exhibitions and oversees a growing collection of art, music, and material culture. She has curated numerous exhibitions, most recently the critically-acclaimed Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists.

After teaching at Bard College for three years, Wilkinson entered the museum field in 2002 seeking to satisfy her passion for the arts, writing, scholarly research, and public engagement. Since then, she has worked on exhibitions, publications, and public programs for the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. A spirited leader and communicator, Wilkinson is often called upon to represent her current institution publically to the media. She serves on the executive committee of the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art at Howard University in Washington, DC.