HOUSTON, TX.- Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, today announced the appointment of Ann Dumas as consulting curator of European art at the MFAH. A specialist in 19th- and early 20th-century art, Dumas is currently curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She will begin her appointment at the MFAH in September 2019, dividing her time and responsibilities between Houston and London, in her dual role as MFAH consulting curator and Royal Academy curator.

“We are enormously pleased to announce this partnership with longtime colleagues at the Royal Academy,” said Tinterow. “Ann’s talent as a curator will no doubt bring projects at the highest level of expertise to both institutions.”

Tim Marlow, artistic director of the Royal Academy of Arts, added, “Ann Dumas is a worldclass curator and the partnership between the RA and MFAH will give her a more expansive global stage on which to operate.”

“I am delighted to be taking up the position of consulting curator of European art at the MFAH,” said Dumas. “I’ve always admired their exhibition program, and it will be a privilege to work with their curatorial team.”

Dumas has been at the Royal Academy since 1999. Over the past 25 years, she has been responsible for a number of major international exhibitions, with a focus on her field, French 19th- and early 20th-century art. As guest curator Dumas co-organized The Private Collection of Edgar Degas (1997) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, alongside Tinterow while he was a curator in New York before his appointment to the MFAH. Together, Dumas and Tinterow also co-curated Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams – His Art and His Textiles (2005) and Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (2006).

Exhibitions curated by Dumas for the Royal Academy have included Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters (2010) and Matisse in the Studio (2017). Dumas also co-curated From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 from Moscow and St. Petersburg (2008), Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (2016), and Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 (2017). In addition to her exhibition projects, Dumas has acted as a consultant to a range of museums in Europe and the United States.

Dumas studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the University of London, and wrote her dissertation on the personal art collection of Edgar Degas. On graduating, she was awarded a Hilla von Rebay Research Fellowship at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she undertook in-depth research on the collection as well as on Surrealist paintings in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. In 2019, Dumas was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for services to the Arts.