Rachel Himes

Rachel Hunter Himes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University. Her research emphasizes the decorative arts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France as a site for the development and maintenance of racial ideology, with particular attention to stability and shifts in decorative motifs across slavery and its abolitions. Her research has been supported by The Huntington Library and Museum, the Decorative Art Trust, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, and Columbia’s Office of the Provost. Rachel is a graduate of the Brown University-Rhode Island School of Design Dual Degree Program. 

As a museum educator, Rachel has worked at the Cleveland Museum of Art and The Frick Collection, in addition to providing curatorial assistance to the exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 2022 through May 2023. Her writing has appeared in “Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered” (Yale University Press, 2022), n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Architecture, and The Journal of Museum Education. 

Articles Related to Rachel Himes

2025-06-02

Announcing the 2025 Cohort of the CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice

The Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) is pleased to announce the 2025 cohort of the CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice. Now in its eleventh year, the Seminar will provide twelve outstanding students from around the world with the opportunity to engage in the critical responsibilities of museums today.  The ... Read More >