The Board of Trustees of the Clark Art Institute announced last week the appointment of Esther Bell (member of CODART since 2013), as the Institute’s Hardymon Director. Currently serving as the Clark’s Deputy Director and Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Chief Curator, Bell will become the Clark’s sixth director when she assumes her new role on 1 July.

The Board unanimously elected Bell to the position following an extensive international search. Bell will be the first woman in the Clark’s 70-year history to serve as its director. She succeeds Olivier Meslay, who announced last September that he would be leaving the Clark and returning to his native France in 2026.

Esther Bell

Bell is a key member of the Clark’s senior leadership team. In addition to leading the Institute’s curatorial staff and directing the care and growth of its collections, Bell oversees the work of the Clark’s library, its education and public programming teams, and its visitor services efforts. She also plays a central role in fulfilling the Clark’s commitment to visitor engagement, while representing the Clark on a number of community-based service organizations.

Esther Bell joined the Clark’s staff in 2017 and was appointed Deputy Director in 2022. In her time at the Clark, Bell has spearheaded the Institute’s embrace of a broader array of artists and genres, making ambitious acquisitions and encouraging critical scholarly research of the objects in the collection.

Bell has been deeply involved in the Clark’s special exhibitions program and has organized several of its most important recent exhibitions, including the upcoming exhibition An Exquisite Eye: Introducing the Aso O. Tavitian Collection, celebrating the transformative gift to the Clark from the foundation of the late collector and connoisseur Aso O. Tavitian.

In addition to her curatorial efforts, Bell was responsible for a major expansion of the Clark’s education and public programming activities. Bell also regularly teaches courses in the Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art and frequently lectures in the United States and Europe. She has co-edited and contributed to numerous scholarly exhibition catalogues.

Prior experience

Before joining the Clark, Bell served as the curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Prior to that, Bell was the curator of European paintings, drawings, and sculpture at the Cincinnati Art Museum. She began her career in New York, holding positions as a research assistant and curatorial fellow at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum.

Bell holds a doctorate in the history of art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a specialization in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European art. She earned a master’s degree from the Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art, and a bachelor’s degree in the history of art from the University of Virginia. She completed a Fulbright Fellowship at the Musée du Louvre in 2003 and has held several other fellowships.

In 2020, Bell completed a fellowship at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York. In 2015, Apollo magazine named her one of the top curators in North America under the age of 40.