Milwauke Art Museum announces new Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions

Milwaukee, WI, January 26, 2009 — The Milwaukee Art Museum has appointed Brady Roberts as Chief Curator, announced Museum Director Daniel Keegan today. Roberts will assume his position on March 2, 2009.

Roberts, who succeeds Joseph Ketner, most recently was the curator of a contemporary art space in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that represents artists from around the world. From 2001 to 2006, he served as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Phoenix Museum of Art. Before moving west, Roberts was the executive director of the Dubuque Museum of Art from 1997 to 1999, and the curator of collections and exhibitions of the Davenport Museum of Art (now the Figge Art Museum) from 1989 to 1997.

“Brady Roberts is a widely respected curator who is known for his scholarly record and for the ambitious nature of the projects he initiates,” said Keegan. “He is committed to framing important art-historical questions with topical relevance, developing a strong interpretive point of view, and fostering new discoveries for new audiences and visitors.”

As Chief Curator, Roberts will oversee the Museum’s collections and exhibitions — including the research, cataloguing, care, display and interpretation of the artworks, as well as the acquisition of significant new works — while leading the curatorial staff of 25 departmental professionals.

In 1989 Roberts earned his Master of Arts in art history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and completed his thesis, titled Willem de Kooning’s Existential Aesthetics. He received his Bachelor of Arts in art history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has curated a number of touring exhibitions with major scholarly catalogues, including Constructing New Berlin in 2006 and Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed in 1996.

Laurie Winters, curator of earlier European art and coordinating curator of the upcoming exhibition Jan Lievens, has been promoted to Director of Exhibitions, a new position at the Museum effective March 2. Winters, who specializes in earlier French and Central European painting, joined the Museum in 1997. In 2007, Winters was one of ten U.S. curators selected to participate in the inaugural year of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a program at the Columbia Business School in New York that prepares top curators for positions in museum leadership.

Winters has organized—often with international colleagues—a number of exhibitions that have ranked among the best-attended shows in the Museum’s history. In 2000-2001, in conjunction with the opening of the Museum’s new addition, she was responsible for the expansion and renovation of the European galleries. In 2002, Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland was named one of the top five exhibitions of the year by Apollo magazine, and earned Winters Poland’s Cavalier’s Cross of the Order of Merit. Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity, which concluded its international tour to the Albertina in Vienna, the Deutsches Historisches Museum-Berlin, and the Musée du Louvre in Paris in January of 2008, has been recognized as a model of international collaboration. Additionally, the Biedermeier catalogue was named Book of the Year (2007) at the Vienna Art Fair.

For more information about recent changes at MAM, visit their website. We wish Brady Roberts and Laurie Winters the best success in their new roles.