Newport Annual Members’ Juried Exhibition

Dr. Helen Burnham is the Pamela and Peter Voss Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her primary area of expertise is in the art of 19th-century France, for which she received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2007. Prior to joining the MFA in 2008, she was an assistant curator at the Musée d’art américain, Giverny, and a research assistant at the Frick Collection, New York. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in 2000. Dr. Burnham is the curator of “Matisse in the Studio” at the MFA (April 9–July 9, 2017), which will travel to the Royal Academy in London (August 5–November 12, 2017). She also curated the major traveling exhibition on the subject of Japonisme, entitled “Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan,” which traveled to Japanese and North American venues and was seen by more than 500,000 visitors. At the MFA, she has organized a number of exhibitions from the collection, including “Millet and Rural France” (2009) and “Manet in Black” (2012). She was also the host curator for “Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty” (2015), as well as “Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane, Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti” (2013). Her dissertation on fashion in the work of Edouard Manet has led to two recent publications: an essay on his pastels for the Musée d’Orsay retrospective (2010), and an essay for the Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity catalogue (Musée d’Orsay; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago, 2012-2013). She is also a contributor to the Getty/Art Institute of Chicago catalogue on Manet.

Dr. Leora Maltz-Leca is Associate Professor of Global Contemporary Art and Chair of the Department of Theory & History of Art & Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the author of William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises (2018), which explores how the South African artist renders the physical processes of the studio—cutting, pasting and projecting light—as metaphors for the way we think and live. Maltz-Leca has published essays and criticism in Artforum, Frieze, Art Bulletin, Art Papers, African Arts, Art South Africa, and Arteeast. As the Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum, in summer 2018, Maltz-Leca commissioned “Remember Bimbia,” Pascale Marthine Tayou’s memorial to global slavery, and an acknowledgement the Redwood’s role in Rhode Island’s slave economy. Maltz-Leca was born and raised in Durban, South Africa, and holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Yale, an M.A. in Art History from Brown, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard.