The Rijksmuseum has appointed Charles Kang as its Curator of 18th- and 19th-Century Drawings. He succeeds Robert-Jan te Rijdt who retires this month. Charles Kang, currently the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History Leadership at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University, will start on 1 March 2022.
Charles Kang (born 1980) studied the history of art at the University of Chicago (B.A.), Williams College (M.A.) and most recently Columbia University (Ph.D.), where he wrote his dissertation about how the use of wax by 18th-century French artists and artisans reshaped modern definitions of fine art. He previously worked at the Williams College Museum of Art, where he co-curated the exhibition Works as Progress/Work in Progress: Drawing in 18th- and 19th-century France, The Frick Collection in New York and the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. His areas of interest include the intersections between drawing, natural history and early ethnography, the role of drawing in ornament and three-dimensional object design, as well as the links between drawing practice and gender inequality in artistic training.