WELLESLEY, MASS.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College announced that Dr. Heather Hughes has been appointed the Kemper Assistant Curator of Academic Affairs and Exhibitions, effective January 6, 2020. As a member of the curatorial team, Hughes will create and oversee cross-disciplinary projects, programs, and exhibitions designed to engage faculty and students from a wide variety of disciplines with the permanent collections at the Davis.

“A specialist in Northern European works on paper produced between 1550 and 1750, Heather brings scholarly rigor, broad art historical knowledge, and pedagogical expertise to the Davis,” said Amanda Gilvin, the Davis Museum’s Sonja Novak Koerner ’51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs. “In her curatorial projects and teaching, she has worked on topics ranging from 18th-century printed textiles, Islamic manuscript painting, and contemporary works on paper by African American artists. The Wellesley community will have many opportunities to learn from the interdisciplinary, collaborative projects that she will lead at the Davis.”

Hughes comes to the Davis from the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she served as the Senior Research Assistant and Study Room Manager in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. In this capacity, she lectured extensively in the study room and spearheaded outreach initiatives to local universities, high schools, and community organizations. During her tenure at SLAM, she also co-curated Printing the Pastoral: Visions of the Countryside in 18th-Century Europe and the St. Louis presentation of Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She also contributed to the museum’s publications for Graphic Revolution: American Printmaking 1960 to Now and The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection. She previously held curatorial fellowships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Hughes’s scholarship addresses the role of print culture in shaping early modern European discourses surrounding gender and ethnic difference. She received her BA from Dartmouth College and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Research for her 2017 dissertation, Clothing as Culture: Delineating National Character in Costume Prints, c. 1600–1650, was supported by a Netherland-America Foundation Fulbright Fellowship and a Dr. Anton C. R. Dreesmann Fellowship at the Rijksmuseum.