WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- The Norton Museum of Art today announced the appointment of Tim B. Wride as the William & Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography. The position was previously held by Charlie Stainback, who was promoted to Assistant Director of the Norton earlier this year.

Before joining the Norton, Wride spent 14 years at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as Curator of Photography. He also founded and served as Executive Director of the Los Angeles-based No Strings Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic organization that provides artist grants to American photographers. Before founding that organization, he established The Curatorial Eye, which offered lectures, seminars, workshops, and mentoring to photographers, collectors, and not-for-profit institutions.

“The Norton Museum, like any museum, is only as great as the curators and the collection,” says Hope Alswang, Norton Director and CEO. “With Tim Wride, the Norton Museum adds a significant curatorial voice, and I look forward to working with him.”

During his tenure at LACMA, Wride curated numerous exhibitions from the LACMA Collection, and special exhibitions such as Retail Fictions: the Commercial Photography of Ralph Bartholomew (1997); Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution (2001); Donald Blumberg (2002, and Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick (2004, and authored the catalogues that accompanied them. He also contributed the photography component and an anthology essay to the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (2000), which traced the interaction of fine art and popular culture in creating the identity of California.

“I am looking forward to joining the talented curators at the Norton Museum of Art and to become a part of the South Florida community,” Wride says. “The Norton’s photography collection is filled with some absolute gems, and I also look forward to continue to build it and contextualize the collection in new exhibitions.” He adds that, “Building a collection that is rich, meaningful, and above all, relevant to the community it serves, is a challenge that I am eager to tackle at the Norton.”

Wride co-curated and wrote the Aperture monograph for Pirkle Jones: Sixty Years of Photography (2001), a traveling exhibition that premiered at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and also curated To Protect and To Serve: Photography from the LAPD Archives (2002) that traveled internationally. In 2005, he curated Hurrell’s Men: Hollywood, Glamour, and Masculinity, which traveled nationally, and the following year, Long Exposures: Contemporary Photo-Essays, and A Curator’s Eye: The Visual Legacy of Robert A. Sobieszek. In 2007, as a response to the traveling exhibition of Ansel Adams at 100, Wride organized an exhibition of contemporary landscape: RE-siting the West.