David Park Curry

David Park Curry, senior curator of Decorative Arts, American Painting & Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, specializes in American and European art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Currently charged with reinstalling Baltimore’s American wing, he is particularly interested in exploring cultural crossroads where art, decoration, and commerce intersect. Dr. Curry holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University. He has lectured widely in the United States and England, and published on Homer, Whistler, Sargent, American Impressionism and Realism, folk art, Victorian architecture, world fairs, and period framing. His most recent monograph, James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces, was published in 2004. That year, his Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited (1989), was reprinted. In 2010 he joined colleagues at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to publish their extensive collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts – many of the pieces acquired during his fifteen-year tenure. Recently, his essay, “Much in Little Space: Whistler’s White and Yellow Exhibition as an Aesthetic Movement Bellwether,” appeared in The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, a traveling exhibition of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts that opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is currently on view at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. In 2012, the National Gallery in Washington will publish his essay, “Sunday in the Park with George Bellows” for their Bellows retrospective. Dr. Curry is currently working on a contextual study of the Hayes presidential china as well as a short book on William Merritt Chase’s still life paintings of fish.