News Release: 18 October 1999
National Gallery of Art Names Jeffrey Weiss Head of Department of Modern and Contemporary Art
Washington, DC -- National Gallery of Art director Earl A. Powell III has announced the appointment of Jeffrey Weiss as head of the department of modern and contemporary art. He replaces Marla Prather, who was the Gallery’s head of twentieth-century art and who will become curator of post-war art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
"Jeffrey Weiss is a respected scholar in his field and has organized exceptional exhibitions during his time at the Gallery," said Powell.
Weiss has held various curatorial positions in the Gallery’s department of twentieth-century art since 1991 and became curator of twentieth-century art in 1999. He was the curator of the exhibition Mark Rothko (1998) and co-curator of Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906 (1997). He has worked on recent permanent collection installations of early modern and post-war art in the East Building and is organizing an exhibition, Pure Painting: Cubism - Futurism - Abstraction, scheduled for 2002.
Weiss is the author of the book The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (1994) and editor of the exhibition catalogue, Mark Rothko (1998). He has lectured and written articles on Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Marcel Duchamp, and on various topics related to French modernism and the New York School.
Weiss received his Ph.D. in 1991 and his M.A. in 1983 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York, and graduated with a B.A. in 1980 from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was a Paul Mellon fellow at the Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts from 1987 to 1990.
Weiss resides with his wife, Stephanie Carroll, in Washington, DC
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