Board of Directors Election
2009 Candidates
Patricia McDonnell, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University
Patricia McDonnell, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University
Statement: College Art Association—the organization’s name signals its role as an advocate for all who teach the visual arts at the postsecondary level. Many of its members do that in the classroom. Those of us who work in art museums also guide learning about visual culture by enriching people’s firsthand encounters with works of art. Museum curators, editors, conservators, and librarians, as well as faculty artists and art historians, all contribute to the CAA world.
As a longtime curator and now as a museum director, and as a devoted member for seventeen years, I have relied greatly on CAA. Because CAA does an excellent job with its highly valuable Annual Conference and various publications—programs that we should sustain—I am especially interested in expanding the organization’s advocacy role for the visual arts in American culture. This advocacy should extol the intrinsic value of encounters with original works of art and partner with organizations such as Americans for the Arts. Advocacy should emphasize the critical importance of visual-arts education in American life and support for those who teach it.
Biography: Patricia McDonnell is director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She holds a PhD and MA in art history from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a BA in German studies from Mills College in Oakland, California. She was chief curator at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington from 2002 to 2006. From 1991 to 2002, she was curator at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. At both institutions, she headed the exhibitions, touring shows, publications, and collection development and contributed to ambitious organizational growth, including moves into new museum buildings. She helped to found the Museum Management Institute, now the Getty Leadership Institute, and administered the program from 1979 to 1983.
A specialist on the artist Marsden Hartley, McDonnell has published widely on American and European modern and contemporary art. In 1995, she curated the nationally touring exhibition Dictated by Life: Marsden Hartley’s German Paintings and Robert Indiana’s Hartley Elegies and authored its catalogue. Two years later, she organized another exhibition on the artist, Marsden Hartley: American Modern, which also toured nationally and for which she wrote the catalogue. She contributed to the publication for the Wadsworth Atheneum’s retrospective on Hartley in 2003. In 2002, she curated the nationally touring exhibition and authored the catalogue for On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art. Most recently, she wrote Painting Berlin Stories: Marsden Hartley, Oscar Bluemner, and the First American Avant-Garde in Expressionist Berlin (2003).
