FORT WORTH, TX.- The Kimbell Art Museum announced today that George T. M. Shackelford will join the staff as senior deputy director in early 2012. “I’m thrilled to welcome George to the Kimbell,” commented Eric M. Lee, the Museum’s director. “He is one of the most brilliant and talented curators in the field today. As the Kimbell expands with its Renzo Piano building project, George will play a crucial role in shaping the Museum’s future.”

In response to accepting the position, Shackelford remarked, “I have loved the Kimbell since I first visited it nearly 30 years ago. It’s one of the most beautiful museums in the world, and I am excited and honored to be joining its staff at this momentous time in its history. I look forward to becoming part of the Kimbell’s family, in Fort Worth, in Texas, and around the globe.”

George T. M. Shackelford
Shackelford is currently chair of the art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, a position he has held since 1999, and was additionally named the Arthur K. Solomon Curator of Modern Art in 2004. He joined the MFA in January 1996 as curator of European paintings. Shackelford is a leading scholar of French art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most recently, he co-curated Degas and the Nude with Xavier Rey, curator of paintings at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, with whom he authored the accompanying exhibition catalogue. The exhibition is jointly organized by the MFA and the Musée d’Orsay and opens in Boston on October 9, 2011.

Shackelford has organized a number of exhibitions for the MFA and has overseen the acquisition of paintings, sculpture, and works of decorative art from the Middle Ages to the modern era. During his tenure, in 2003, the Museum acquired one of the most important paintings by Edgar Degas remaining in a private collection, Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters, Elena and Camilla (1876).

In 1996, Shackelford oversaw the reinstallation of the MFA’s Evans Wing European Galleries. Since then, he has served as co-curator of several major MFA exhibitions, among them Monet in the 20th Century, the most highly attended exhibition in the world in 1998; Van Gogh: Face to Face (2000); Impressionist Still Life (2001–02); Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Monet (2002–03); and Gauguin Tahiti (2003–04), organized with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The centerpiece of this international loan exhibition, which marked the centenary of Gauguin’s death, was the artist’s masterpiece D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?) (1897–98), from the MFA.

Shackelford served as curator of the exhibitions Monet, Renoir, and the Impressionist Landscape (1999); Jean-François Millet (2001); and Delacroix to Munch: Nineteenth-Century Visions (2004), all held at the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts (N/BMFA) in Nagoya, Japan. He also curated The World of Claude Monet, which opened at the N/BMFA in April 2008 and subsequently traveled to Sydney, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand; and Gauguin, which marked the N/BMFA’s 10th anniversary in 2009.

Shackelford has won numerous awards and fellowships, among them the David E. Finley Fellowship of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where in 1984 he organized his first international loan exhibition, Degas: The Dancers. In 2005, he was honored with the title Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the Republic of France. Shackelford has lectured in museums and at universities throughout the United States and Europe. Before joining the MFA, he served for 11 years as curator of European painting and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A native of Louisiana, he is a 1977 summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1986.