Washington, DC—The National Gallery of Art announced today that Virginia Anderson will join the museum as the Christiane Ellis Valone Senior Curator of American Art and head of the art of the Americas. She will assume the role in November.

Anderson will lead the art of the Americas department, which stewards the National Gallery’s collection of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from the Americas. In this role, she will advance the museum’s continued development of a collection of art of the Americas that is reflective of the broad scope of artistic innovation across various media and time periods. Anderson will oversee a permanent collection of paintings, sculptures, and works of decorative art from the 18th century to present day, including the Kaufman Collection, one of the most significant collections of early American furniture and decorative arts ever assembled.

Anderson joins the National Gallery from the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), where she is the senior curator of American art and department head of American painting and sculpture and decorative arts. She brings decades of experience and deep expertise in the field as a scholar of American painting, having organized major exhibitions and installations spanning the colonial era to the present.

“We are thrilled to welcome Virginia Anderson to the National Gallery. Her wealth of experience in the field of American art will provide strong leadership in the ongoing growth of our collection of art of the Americas while enriching the presentation of historic American art at the museum. Anderson’s deep scholarly knowledge and expansive thinking will be a great asset as we work to make our galleries more engaging and relevant to museum audiences today,” said E. Carmen Ramos, the National Gallery’s chief curatorial and conservation officer.

“I am honored to join the distinguished staff of the National Gallery, whose collection of American art is one of the finest in the country. This particular moment offers great opportunities to share the depth, richness, and cultural relevance of this renowned collection with today’s audiences,” said Anderson. “I look forward to working with the outstanding curatorial team to consider the stories these works can tell about the breadth of the American experience, and to celebrate the ways in which American creativity connects to materials and movements from across the globe.”

Anderson’s curatorial practice is centered on expanding the narratives American art can tell through social histories and innovative frameworks, which will further the National Gallery’s ambitions to present a richer and more interconnected history of art in the Americas to its audiences.

While at the BMA, Anderson led the reinstallation of several galleries of the museum’s historic American collection, including two period rooms and galleries that unite paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts to consider themes including land and labor in 19th- and 20th-century American art. She curated and co-curated significant exhibitions including Seeing the Essential: The Sigmund M. and Mary B. Hyman Collection of American Art (2026), Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again (2026), Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA (2024), and By Their Creative Force: American Women Modernists (2019–2020), among others. Her next exhibition, Tempting to Touch: Surface and Substance in 20th-Century American Art, will open at the BMA in May 2027.

Prior to her time at the BMA, Anderson was the Diane and Michael Maher Assistant Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. There she coedited a major collection catalog, American Paintings at Harvard, Volume Two: Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels, and Stained Glass by Artists Born 1826–1856, and co-organized an exhibition of American pre-Raphaelite art, The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle (2007). Anderson has also served as an appointed adjunct professor in the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University, and as an adjunct professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Anderson holds an AB in government from Harvard University and an MA and PhD in art history from Boston University. She is also a member of the American Art Curatorial Committee at the Harvard Art Museums.

About the National Gallery of Art's Art of the Americas Department

The National Gallery of Art’s art of the Americas department oversees an internationally recognized collection of over 2,000 works of 18th- to early 20th-century American art, as well as modern and contemporary Native American art and colonial Latin American art. It also includes the promised gift of the important collection of early American furniture assembled by George M. and Linda H. Kaufman.

The collection consists of more than 1,500 paintings, 200 sculptures, and 500 works of decorative arts. Its strengths are in 19th-century landscape paintings, portraits, still lifes, folk art paintings, Indigenous images, Gilded Age paintings, and American impressionism. The collection contained fewer than a dozen historical American paintings when the National Gallery opened its doors and has grown substantially in the years since. It is now the largest representation of any national school in the museum’s collection. Significant acquisitions include the 1971 purchase of the newly rediscovered second set of Thomas Cole’s famous four-part series The Voyage of Life (1842) and The Seine (c. 1902) by Henry Ossawa Tanner, as well as the 1985 acquisition of Rembrandt Peale’s Rubens Peale with a Geranium (1801).

In 2014, the National Gallery received over 250 paintings from the former Corcoran Gallery of Art. Included were masterpieces by such major figures as John Singleton Copley, Samuel F. B. Morse, Charles Bird King, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and George Bellows, as well as one of the Corcoran’s most famous works, Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara (1857). The Corcoran transfer brought in works by important early 20th-century Native American artists including Awa Tsireh, Tonita Peña, and Velino Shije Herrera.

The collection has strategically expanded in the past decade, adding key works by artists such as Edward Mitchell Bannister, Theresa Bernstein, Fidelia Bridges, Aaron Douglas, Anna Eliza Hardy, Elizabeth Gilbert Jerome, Lilly Martin Spencer, Archibald John Motley Jr., Elizabeth Okie Paxton, Hannah Brown Skeele, and Mary Bradish Titcomb. Efforts will continue to locate and acquire great paintings by artists not yet represented in the collection that will further enrich the museum’s presentation of American historical art. Over the past few years, particularly following the exhibition The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans (2023–2024), the National Gallery’s collection of contemporary Native American artists has grown to include major works by Jeffrey Gibson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kay WalkingStick, and Fritz Scholder, among others. The growing collection of colonial Latin American art includes Christ Gathering His Garments after the Flagellation (c. 1670s), a major painting by Juan Correa, one of the most important artists working in 17th-century Mexico City, and Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1730–1739) by Tomás de Merlo, Guatemala’s most important 18th-century artist. Given the longstanding cultural and artistic connections between the UK and the United States, the National Gallery’s British collection is stewarded by the Art of the Americas department. Reflecting these connections, works by British artists are presented, where appropriate, in galleries devoted to American, British, and European art.

Through special exhibitions, installations, publications, and educational initiatives, the art of the Americas department deepens understanding of the artistic, cultural, and historical contexts that shaped American and British art in the early modern era. The department seeks to continually expand the collection, and its curators collaborate closely with conservators and scientists to ensure the long-term preservation of the art within it.

About the National Gallery of Art  

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, is the nation’s art museum, home to a renowned collection of over 160,000 works of art, from antiquity to today. Each year, the museum welcomes millions of people in person and online to explore art, creativity, and our shared humanity. Located on the National Mall, admission to the West and East Buildings, Sculpture Garden, special exhibitions, and public programs is always free.