The announcement of its new Assistant Curator of Paintings, Sculpture and Works on Paper is a full-circle moment for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter).
Michaela Haffner, currently a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Yale University, was on staff at the Carter a few years ago. She starts her new role at the Fort Worth museum on January 22.
“I am honored to be joining the Carter, the institution where I first began my career as a Curatorial Assistant,” said Haffner. “Knowing the breadth of the Museum’s collection, as well as its role in expressing and shaping American creativity, I am thrilled to take on this role and to explore painting, sculpture, and works on paper as vehicles for the varied and evolving histories told by American artists. I’m excited to be joining the Carter team in the new year and look forward to working alongside the curatorial staff and the community to bring these stories to the Museum’s audiences.”
Drawn from the Amon Carter’s collection, these richly saturated lithographs reflect Gego’s interest in the intersection between line and space. Her choice of dramatic blacks and reds, contrasted with the lightly colored paper sheet, highlights the images generated by negative space, or what Gego called, “the nothing between the lines.”
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As a Curatorial Assistant at the Carter, Haffner served as her team’s sole junior staff member and curated five exhibitions, including Hedda Sterne: Printed Variations (2018) and Between the Lines: Gego as Printmaker (2017), which highlighted the lesser-known print practices of artists primarily known for sculpture and painting.
She also curated Caught on Paper (2017), which explored the theme of “the hunt” by bringing together popular ephemera like postcards and lithographs from Currier & Ives - with traditional nineteenth-century works from the likes of Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington, and John James Audubon, allowing visitors to consider today’s visual culture alongside historical masterworks.
She has also advanced the Museum’s scholarship, authoring essays for two exhibition catalogues—A New American Sculpture (2017) and The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion (2017)—and writing the in-gallery catalogue for Fluid Expressions: The Prints of Helen Frankenthaler (2017).
As Assistant Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper, Haffner will leverage her experience and deep knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture to work with the Carter’s extensive collection and realize projects that further the Carter’s mission: to tell the ongoing story of American creativity across artistic traditions, mediums, and time periods.
Haffner will report to the Director of Collections and Exhibitions and work alongside the Carter’s curators and the exhibitions and collections staff to bring this vision to life and foreground unexplored perspectives and connections.
The Scene
“The Carter is immensely proud of its curatorial staff and the dynamic program and scholarship it puts forth,” said Andrew J. Walker, the Carter’s Executive Director. “As stewards of a robust and growing American art collection and steadfast partners to living artists, our curators are grounded in deep knowledge and a belief in the power of this work—traits that Michaela exemplifies. We look forward to benefitting from her passion for American art, commitment to scholarship, and zest for our mission.”
Haffner holds a BA in the History of Art and French from Wellesley College and an MA and MPhil from Yale University.
As a PhD candidate at Yale, Haffner’s studies center around nineteenth- and twentieth-century art in the United States. Her dissertation examines the visual origins of “wellness” culture in the nineteenth century, particularly the ways in which artists represented nature and landscape as therapeutic, looking closely at several works from the Carter’s collection, including those by Laura Gilpin, John Frederick Kensett, and William J. McCloskey.
Haffner has given several public lectures on the topic, including Open Air: Sanitarium Photographs and the White Settlement of the American West, 1900–1920 at the 2022 Western History Association Conference and Visualizing Air: The Climatic Cure and the Search for Health at the Turn of the Century, which she delivered at the Southeastern College Art Conference in 2022.
Drawn from the Amon Carter’s collection, this selection of lithographs features two thematic series that Sterne completed at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1967: Metamorphoses, a study of the vegetal folds of a head of lettuce, and Vertical-Horizontals, a study of the atmospheric recession of the horizon. Both series expose Sterne’s highly original style and her intense exploration of a single theme over the course of many experimental compositions.
In addition to her previous tenure at the Carter, Haffner has held positions at institutions across the country, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Davis Museum & Cultural Center in Wellesley, Massachusetts; and Childs Gallery in Boston. She has worked with several Texas institutions, including the San Antonio Museum of Art, the McNay Art Museum, and the Briscoe Western Art Museum. Additionally, Haffner has worked internationally, serving as the Liliane Pingoud Soriano Curatorial Fellow within the Département des Arts graphiques at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
Learn more: Amon Carter Museum of American Art
