Nancy Mowll Mathews

Nancy Mowll Mathews is the Eugenie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art. She directs the Prendergast Archive and Study Center at WCMA, conducting ongoing research and organizing exhibitions and publications on the Prendergasts and their era (1850-1950). Currently underway is a book and exhibition, "Prendergast in Italy," slated for 2009. In addition, she is guest curator of the Guggenheim's Art in America, the first major exhibition of American art in China which opened in Beijing in February, 2007 and travels to Shanghai, Moscow, and Bilbao until the spring of 2008. Another exhibition which was on view at the Phillips Collection until May 20, 2007 is her groundbreaking Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910, which explored the interconnections between the new technology of film and the visual arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

She is the author of six books on Mary Cassatt, including the influential biographical study, Mary Cassatt: A Life (1998). Other publications include the critically acclaimed Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life (2001) and the volume of essays, American Dreams: American Art in the Williams College Museum of Art to 1950 (2001). She is the co-author of two catalogues raisonnes: Mary Cassatt: The Color Prints (1989) and Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonne (1990) and is president of the Catalogue Raisonne Scholars Association.

She also serves on the board of trustees of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA, the Museums Committee of the College Art Association, the board of the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, and the editorial board of the Woman's Art Journal.

Mathews received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, N.Y.U., and has been at Williams College since 1988. She teaches in the Williams College Art Department and Graduate Program in the History of Art.

For more information, see http://www.williams.edu/gradart/Frame/MathewsFrameset.htm