DMA Names Sue Canterbury the Pauline Gill Sullivan Curator of American Art

Sue Canterbury

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) announced on June 25 that Sue Canterbury has been named its Pauline Gill Sullivan Curator of American Art. Canterbury has been the Associate Curator of American Art at the DMA for nearly eight years and will now lead the department.

Prior to her arrival in Dallas in 2011, Canterbury was the Associate Curator in the Department of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. She has extensive knowledge of late 19th- and early 20th-century American art and the role of the transatlantic exchange between the art centers of Europe and the United States. Earlier, she worked as an assistant curator at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

In making the announcement last Tuesday, DMA Director Dr. Agustin Arteaga said of Canterbury:

“Sue has significantly broadened the range of her projects and stimulated the American Art department’s development. Most recently, she presented Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art and brought new scholarship and public awareness to a forgotten artist with Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow … In acknowledgment of her hard work and original research, it is my great pleasure to promote her to full curator. I know this will spark continued growth in the scope of her projects and cultivation of local collectors.”

The O’Keeffe exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, the first publication devoted to the artist. As Associate Curator at the DMA, Canterbury also oversaw the inauguration of the museum’s Tower Gallery as a space devoted to the presentation of modern art from Mexico and South America. In that same year, upon the completion of the conservation treatment of seven rare mural paintings by Edward Jean Steichen (1879–1973), an artist most noted for his photography, Canterbury developed the first museum exhibition devoted to the exploration and interpretation of the mural series in Edward Steichen: In Exaltation of Flowers (1910–1914). In 2014, she also organized Alexandre Hogue: The Erosion Series, the first exhibition to focus on this important series of Dust Bowl paintings by the artist, which also emphasized its parallels to contemporary climate issues.

Canterbury earned her M.A. from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she was awarded the Judith M. Lenett Memorial Fellowship. She graduated magna cum laude with a double major in Art History and Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Wellesley College, where she was awarded the Plogsterth Prize in Art History and also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

For more on this story, please go here.