NEW DIRECTOR OF CURATORIAL AFFAIRS & CURATOR OF EUROPEAN ART
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CLAIRE CHANDLER WHITNER
Worcester, MA???June 5, 2018???The Worcester Art Museum (WAM) today announced that Claire Chandler Whitner will be its next Director of Curatorial Affairs and James A. Welu Curator of European Art. Whitner comes to WAM from the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, where she has been since 2014, most recently as the Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator, and where she oversaw the recent reinstallation of the Davis??? permanent collections galleries. A specialist in German Modernism and 17th-century Dutch art, Whitner will begin her new post on August 20, 2018.
At WAM, Whitner will have broad oversight of the Museum???s curatorial direction, across all departments. This includes bringing together WAM???s curators, educators, and conservators to collaborate on planning and presenting new exhibitions and installations that address a central element of the Museum???s mission: connecting visitors, communities, and cultures through experiences with art. She will also oversee the Museum???s ongoing work to reexamine its installations of European and American art, which began in 2013 with the [remastered] exhibition of its noted Old Masters collection, and has continued since then, including with a program in 2017 that added labels about slave ownership to historical portraits in its American art installation. Whitner will take a leading role in shaping the Museum???s collecting efforts, working with WAM???s director, Matthias Waschek, to identify and secure gifts and purchases that address specific collection needs.
???Claire has demonstrated a dynamic approach to rethinking a museum???s exhibitions and how an institution can use this process to improve audience engagement,??? said Matthias Waschek, C. Jean and Myles McDonough Director of the Worcester Art Museum. ???While her roots are in European art history, from Old Masters to the Modern period, her work at the Davis Museum extended across a wide spectrum. This includes many of the leadership and management functions that will be central to her position at WAM. We are thrilled to welcome her to the Museum at this exciting time.???
???I have deep respect and admiration for the Worcester Art Museum???s vision to create a dynamic encyclopedic museum, one that works to demonstrate the relevance of art to the lives of all its visitors,??? said Claire Chandler Whitner. ???Across its different collections, WAM has been on the forefront of rethinking how to present works of art, and identifying the questions that should be asked about historical objects decades, centuries, or even millenia after they were made. While I am sorry to leave my colleagues at the Davis Museum, I am excited about the opportunities ahead of us in Worcester.???
Whitner graduated from The Johns Hopkins University with degrees in English and German.?? She subsequently earned a Masters and Ph.D. in Germanic languages from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation focused on modernist design in Germany and was advised by faculty in the German, Art History, and Comparative Literature departments.?? She joined the Davis Museum at Wellesley College as Associate Curator in 2014, where her projects included co-curating the Davis. ReDiscovered.?? A major initiative that created 19 new permanent collections galleries in the Museum, the Davis. ReDiscovered doubled the number of works from the collection on view, while providing fresh educational materials and installation approaches.
In May 2016, Whitner was promoted to Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator, taking on a range of leadership roles supporting donor cultivation, grant development, and exhibition planning.
In addition she continued her work as curator with exhibitions such as Anni Albers: Connections (2016), On Distant Shores: Landscapes by Constable and Kensett (2017), and #ART-LESS: the Davis. Without Immigrants (2017).
Photo by Tsugumi Maki