There’s new movement in the game of curatorial musical chairs: George Shackelford (right), the Chair, Art of Europe, and Solomon Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has a new job as Senior Deputy director (and also chief curator) at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.
The announcement is expected soon — possibly over the weekend. UPDATE: My blog post prompted the Kimbell to release the news on Friday. Here’s the story as told by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Shackelford has been at the MFA since 1996, and he was previously the curator of paintings at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. He’s a Texan originally from Louisiana. (Apologies for the earlier mistake.)
Shackelford has curated many fine exhibitions at the MFA, including the upcoming fall show, Degas and the Nude, which was done with Musee d’Orsay.
The move makes sense for the Kimbell, though, and gives the MFA an opportunity to recharge the European art department.
According to his MFA bio:
Shackelford has organized a number of exhibitions for the MFA and has overseen the acquisition of paintings, sculpture, and works of decorative art from the middle ages to the modern era. During his tenure, the Museum acquired in 2003 one of the most important paintings by Edgar Degas remaining in a private collection, Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters, Elena and Camilla (1876, oil on canvas) [left]. In 2003-2004, he was co-curator of Gauguin(1876, oil on canvas). In 2003-2004, he was co-curator of Gauguin Tahiti, organized with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The centerpiece of this international loan exhibition, which marked the centenary of Gauguin’s death, was the artist’s masterpiece D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?) from the MFA.
In 1996, Shackelford oversaw the reinstallation of the MFA’s Evans Wing European Galleries. Since then, he has served as co-curator of several major MFA exhibitions, among them Monet in the 20th Century, the most highly attended exhibition in the world in 1998; Van Gogh: Face to Face in 2000; Impressionist Still Life in 2001-02; and Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Monet in 2002-03. He served as curator of the exhibitions Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist Landscape (1999); Jean-François Millet (2001); and Delacroix to Munch: Nineteenth-Century Visions (2004), all held at the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts (N/BMFA), Nagoya, Japan. Most recently, he served as curator of The World of Claude Monet, which opened at the N/BMFA in April 2008, subsequently traveling to Sydney, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand, and was curator of Gauguin, which marked the N/BMFA’s 10th anniversary in 2009.
Shackelford is staying in Boston through the opening of Degas show (Oct. 9), and beyond — early December according to some accounts.