Before her tenure at the National Gallery, Shelley Langdale held curatorial positions at Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Cleveland Museum of Art; and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has a longstanding interest in the work of African American artists and coauthored the first major exhibition catalog on Black artists John Wilson and Joseph Norman for MFA Boston in 1994. In 2012, she curated the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition Full Spectrum: Prints from the Brandywine Workshop, featuring work by BIPOC, Asian, AAPI, and white European and American artists.