The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) has announced the appointment of Dr. Chassica ‘Chaz’ Kirchhoff (Member of CODART since 2024) as the J. J. Medveckis Curator of Arms and Armor. Kirchhoff joins the PMA from the Detroit Institute of Arts. She begins her new role on 30 November 2026.
As the J. J. Medveckis Curator of Arms and Armor, Kirchhoff will be responsible for the care, installation, and development of the museum’s renowned holdings of historic European arms and armor. The collection encompasses more than 1,300 objects, including complete suits of armor, equestrian equipment, shields, helmets, and weapons. At the core of the collection is the 1977 bequest by the New York–based businessman and philanthropist Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch (1884–1976), which comprises over one thousand works dating from classical antiquity through the nineteenth century.
“I am immensely excited and honored to step into this new position, following in the footsteps of exceptional scholars as the steward for one of the most artistically and historically significant arms and armor collections in North America,” said Kirchhoff.
At the Detroit Institute of Arts, Kirchhoff has served as the Associate Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, overseeing a collection of around 9,000 objects from antiquity through 1850, including significant examples of arms and armor, metalwork, stained glass, ceramics, tapestries, textiles, and sculpture. She made several transformative acquisitions and organized the exhibition Guests of Honor: Armor as Fashion (2025–2027), which reunites the armor of a knight, diplomat, and courtier with the portraits that depict them. CODART recently published a feature exploring the exhibition and its approach to presenting the loans. Previously, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Arms and Armor.
Recent publications include a well-received monograph, The Thun-Hohenstein Album: Cultures of Remembrance in a Paper Armory (Boydell Press, 2023); “Embodying the Edges of Empires: Armors in the Hungarian Style for Habsburg and Ottoman Courts” in The Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 7 (2023); and the forthcoming “Shifting Spirals: The Horns of Henry VIII’s Helmet and the Changeable Forms of Luxury Armor” in The Changing Face of a Fool: Henry VIII’s Horned Helmet.
Kirchhoff received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Drury University and earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Kansas, where her dissertation examined how armor and its representations in diverse media functioned as sites of meaning and objects of memory in the late medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire.