The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) has announced the appointment of Emily J. Peters as Curator of Prints and Drawings. Peters, the Associate Curator of Prints Drawings and Photographs at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum since 2008, will assume her responsibilities at the CMA in April. She will then be joining fellow CODART member Betsy Wieseman who was appointed Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, 1500–1800, at the Cleveland museum last December.
Peters will fill a vacancy that opened with the recent retirement of Jane Glaubinger, the museum’s former longtime Curator of Prints. In 2015, Jane Glaubinger and her colleagues received a group of CODART members for a tour of the museum during CODART’s study trip to the Midwest. For a detailed review of this weeklong trip to the Midwest, see the 2015 Winter issue of our eZine.
Information from the museum, 23 January 2017
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) has announced the appointment of Emily J. Peters as Curator of Prints and Drawings. The museum’s renowned collection of prints and drawings, ranging from the Renaissance to the early 21st century, is distinguished by the quality and rarity of its holdings. Peters’s appointment follows an international search. She will assume her responsibilities at the CMA in April.
As Curator of Prints and Drawings, Peters will oversee the care and development of the collection, working closely with the Director and Chief Curator on the identification and acquisition of works of art to augment the collection. Together with an Assistant or Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings—who will be appointed later this year—Peters will be responsible for exhibitions in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Galleries; she will also curate special exhibitions in the Smith Foundation Hall and Gallery that highlight all aspects of European and American graphic art. Peters will also develop interpretive and didactic materials designed to appeal to broad audiences, helping to deepen visitors’ appreciation and understanding of graphic art.
The collections for which Peters will be responsible span more than 500 years of artistic production throughout Europe and the United States. Consisting of approximately 22,000 prints and 4,000 drawings, the collection is internationally known for its rarity and high quality. Areas of particular strength include Italian Renaissance drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael as well as a strong group of engravings and woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer. Highlights of the 17th century include drawings and a range of etched subjects by Rembrandt van Rijn, while an impressive group of early lithographs and celebrated drawings by Ingres and Degas stand out among the 19th-century holdings. The drawings collection is admired for watercolors by Blake, Turner and Palmer, and for luminous pastels by Cassatt and Redon. Among the highlights of modernism is a group of more than 50 German Expressionist prints and drawings by Miró, Picasso and Winslow Homer.
Peters brings more than a decade of curatorial work and museum experience to the CMA. In 2005, she joined the curatorial team at the RISD Museum as Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs; in 2008, she was promoted to Associate Curator. A specialist of 15th- and 16th-century Netherlandish prints and drawings, Peters has mounted at RISD such diverse exhibitions as Design and Description: Renaissance and Baroque Drawings (2006); Urban America, 1930–1970 (2007); The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver 1480–1650 (2009); The Festive City (2014); and Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection (2015). Along with organizing exhibitions, Peters has collaborated closely with her curatorial colleagues at RISD in planning the reinstallation of the museum’s European galleries, set to open in the fall of 2017.
Peters’s scholarship has been widely praised. Her exhibition catalogue The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver 1480–1650 (2009) received a first-place award from the New England Museum Association, and her catalogue essay, “Systems and Swells: The Collective Lineage of Engraved Lines” was deemed runner-up for essay of the year by the Association of Art Museum Curators.
Holding a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Peters has been the recipient of several fellowships from institutions including the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB; the Belgian American Educational Foundation; and the American Association of Netherlandic Studies. In 2002–3, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for dissertation research in Antwerp.