The Zimmerli Art Museum Names New Chief Curator
The role is effective January 6.
The Zimmerli Art Museum has named Jeremiah William McCarthy as Chief Curator. In this new role, effective January 6, 2025, McCarthy will serve on the Museum’s senior leadership team and participate in shaping its mission and vision. He will oversee the Museum’s curatorial department and assume responsibility for the Museum’s scholarly and artistic program while managing the development of the Museum’s permanent collection and exhibitions.
“It’s a great honor to take on this leadership role at the Zimmerli,” said McCarthy. “The Zimmerli’s mission to use art as a tool to educate, inspire, and challenge resonates deeply with me. I am thrilled to lead and empower the curatorial team to advance an experimental program that is diverse, accessible, and academically rigorous.”
Prior to the Zimmerli, McCarthy served as Chief Curator at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA. There, he organized several exhibitions, including The Great Search: Art in a Time of Change, 1928–1945 (2024–25), Toshiko Mori & Frank Lloyd Wright: Dialogue in Details (2023), Block Party: Community and Celebration in American Art (2023), and Gavin Benjamin: Break Down and Let It All Out (2022). Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania, which he co-organized with Fallingwater's Senior Director of Preservation and Collections Scott Perkins, was the most attended exhibition in the Museum’s history and traveled to the National Building Museum, Washington, DC, where it is currently on view. His most recent exhibition Anila Quayyum Agha: Interwoven, on view through January 5, 2025, will travel to three museums following The Westmoreland’s presentation. The exhibition’s accompanying catalogue will be published in March by Dancing Foxes Press, Brooklyn, NY; it is the first monograph to date of this important Pakistani-American visual artist. Under his leadership, The Westmoreland transformed its permanent collection galleries into dynamic, rotating displays and diversified its holdings of American artists through strategic acquisitions by Berenice Abbott, Anila Quayyum Agha, Charles Atlas, Isabel Bishop, Elizabeth Catlett, Nick Cave, Dorothy Dehner, Milt Hinton, Toshiko Takaezu, and Walasse Ting, among others. McCarthy’s exhibitions at The Westmoreland have received support from Art Bridges, the Henry Luce Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Prior to his work at The Westmoreland, McCarthy was consulting curator for The Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. There, he co-organized Inspired Encounters: Women Artists and the Legacies of Modern Art (2022–23), the inaugural exhibition of the campus’s new David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center in Tarrytown, NY, and multi-author publication of the same name. Prior to his work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, he served as Curator at the National Academy of Design and Associate Curator at the American Federation of Arts. Major exhibitions he has organized or co-organized include For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design (2019–22), which travelled to eight museums in all five regions of the United States, and Women Artists in Paris, 1850–1900 (2017–18; with Laurence Madeline and Suzanne Ramljak), which was awarded “Best Painting Show of 2018” by The Boston Globe. He also edited and contributed to both accompanying scholarly catalogues, published by Yale University Press.
“Jeremiah brings to the role of Chief Curator an extraordinary range of talents. His brilliance as an exhibition maker is matched by his broad scholarly knowledge across historical and contemporary art,” said Maura Reilly, Director of the Zimmerli Art Museum. “His expertise in American art and passion for audience development will be invaluable to us. I am thrilled to partner with him on the artistic vision for the Zimmerli’s future.”
Previously, McCarthy has worked in the curatorial and education departments of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and he was an inaugural teaching fellow at The Frick Collection, New York. Alongside his curatorial work, he has taught in museums extensively and as a visiting lecturer in art history at The City College of New York. He has also mentored as a supervisor in the Diversity in Arts Leadership program administered by Americans for the Arts. He was born in New York City and received his B.A. from The Macaulay Honors College at CUNY and his M.A. in art history from Hunter College.
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