Kevin Tucker named senior curator at Dallas Museum of Art
Kevin W. Tucker. Image courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.
“On behalf of the DMA Board of Trustees, it is with great pleasure that we announce Kevin’s promotion to senior curator, as he has been an exemplary part of our curatorial team,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Kevin’s work over the last decade has firmly established the decorative arts and design program in Dallas as one of the finest of its type in the country. For his many efforts as a leader in his field, we are very pleased to recognize Kevin with this promotion.”
“Kevin’s award-winning publications and major touring exhibitions, including ‘Modernism in American Silver’ and ‘Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement,’ were received with acclaim by our peers and are now considered standards in the field,” said Olivier Meslay, the DMA’s associate director of curatorial affairs.
Currently co-organizing the first retrospective of industrial designer Peter Muller-Munk, in 2010 Tucker authored the catalog and nationally touring exhibition “Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement,” a major study of one of the seminal figures in early 20th-century design. Tucker has lectured and written on various aspects of modern design and was the Dallas Museum of Art’s project director and co-curator for the nationally touring exhibition “Modernism in American Silver: 20th-Century Design” (2005); he also served as an editor and contributor for its accompanying award-winning catalog.
In addition, he co-curated the DMA exhibitions “All the World’s a Stage: Celebrating Performance in the Visual Arts” (2009), “There and Back Again: Selections from the Graham D. Williford Collection of American Art” (2005), and “Imperial Taste: Chinese Porcelain for the Western Trade” (2005); curated “Ten for Tea” (2007) and “Through the Needle’s Eye: American Quilts from the Permanent Collection of the Dallas Museum of Art” (2004); reinstalled the museum’s American decorative arts holdings, including the creation of galleries dedicated to 19th century American silver and 20th century design; and was responsible for numerous major acquisitions, including the Huntingdon wine cistern, a pair of Louis Comfort Tiffany “undersea” windows, a rare Gustav Stickley linen chest, Viktor Schreckengost’s “Jazz Bowl,” and a variety of American silver works such as a Viking vase for the 1901 Buffalo Exposition, a Tiffany & Co. Aztec coffee service for William Randolph Hearst, the gem-studded celestial centerpiece for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, a silver box designed by Archibald Knox, and a silver tea urn designed by architect Eliel Saarinen.
Kevin W. Tucker joined the Dallas Museum of Art as curator of decorative arts and design in June 2003. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field and is a specialist in American decorative arts and design of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Tucker came to the Dallas Museum of Art from the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, S.C., where he had most recently served as chief curator and deputy director. Tucker also served as the Columbia Museum of Art’s curator of decorative arts and associate/assistant curator for decorative arts. In addition to his work in Columbia, Tucker served as curator of decorative arts & Owens-Thomas House at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga.
Tucker has served on the board of the curators committee of the American Association of Museums, and of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and he has been involved with various regional and national professional committees, including that of the Association of Art Museum Curators.
Tucker holds an M.A. degree in Applied History/Museum Studies and a B.A. in History from the University of South Carolina and was the recipient of a 2007 Winterthur Research Fellowship for his work on “Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement.”
The Dallas Museum of Art is known for the strength of its European and American decorative arts collections, with special emphasis in 18th century English silver, 19th and 20th century American silver and ceramics, and 20th century design. In 2002, the Dallas Museum of Art acquired the Jewel Stern American Silver Collection, one of the world’s most distinguished collections of 20th-century American silver. With about 8,000 works, the decorative arts and design collection spans a chronological range from the 16th century to the present in a broad range of media, including furniture, textiles, glassware, ceramics, and metalware, and, most significantly, silver.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Kevin W. Tucker. Image courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.
