Mary Schneider Enriquez Appointed as Harvard Art Museum’s Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

The Harvard Art Museum announces the appointment of Mary Schneider Enriquez as Houghton Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, effective April 5, 2010. Schneider Enriquez has been Latin American art advisor to the Art Museum since 2002, working with the museum’s director and curatorial staff to identify collection and programmatic opportunities in Latin American art. She brings a long history of curatorial, academic, and administrative experience to this position, including undergraduate teaching, independent curatorial and advisory work for institutions across the U.S., art criticism, and fundraising.

“I am pleased to welcome Mary to our staff,” said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museum. “With her long and varied background in the art world, especially in Latin America, and as someone who already has an intimate knowledge of the Art Museum and Harvard University, she brings a distinct perspective to this position.”

Currently visiting lecturer in fine arts at Brandeis University, Schneider Enriquez (Harvard A.B. ’81, A.M. ’87) is also completing her PhD in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. She has served as a member of the Advisory Committee for Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies since 1995 and has been a member of the Board of Trustees at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, since 1999. She is also a member of the Harvard Art Museum’s World Visuality Committee, a group dedicated to addressing societies and their artistic traditions that have previously been underrepresented at Harvard. Emphasizing collaboration with other Harvard collecting institutions, notably the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the committee encourages collaboration with faculty as well as student participation in order to bring these collections and programs into a closer working relationship.

“I look forward to the opportunity to work closely with Tom and the curatorial staff at this important moment in the history of the Harvard Art Museum,” said Schneider Enriquez. “In an institution with a remarkable collection and legacy of exhibitions, I welcome the chance to explore ways to continue to integrate modern and contemporary art from a broad range of cultures into the collection that will enhance the teaching and research mission of the museum.”

Schneider Enriquez’s past activities for the Harvard Art Museum include co-curating the exhibition Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection and organizing the accompanying symposium in 2001, and participating in and directing several lecture series, including the Latin American Leventritt Lectures, over the past several years.

An independent art critic, Schneider Enriquez has written extensively over the last sixteen years for ARTnews, ArtNexus and Art in America magazines. She has also written for the Mexico City daily newspaper Reforma. Her past independent curatorial work includes co-curating an exhibition of Chilean artist Roberto Matta’s work in 2004, Matta: Making the Invisible Visible, at the McMullen Museum at Boston College. In 1999 she curated Gerardo Suter: Labyrinth of Memory, a retrospective of photographs and video installations by the Mexican artist, at the Americas Society and the Sculpture Center, New York, which traveled nationally. She also curated Mexico: A Landscape Revisited with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. The exhibition, which focused on the tradition of landscape painting in Mexican art, opened in Washington DC in 1995 and toured internationally.