Curator of Historical American Art
Curator of Historical American Art Anna O. Marley joined PAFA in March of 2009. Marley is a scholar of American art and material culture from the colonial era to 1945 and holds a B.A. in Art History from Vassar College, an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware, where she completed a dissertation on eighteenth-and early nineteenth century landscape paintings and their display in international merchant’s domestic interiors.
At PAFA, Marley has curated the exhibition Public Treasures/Private Visions: Hudson River School Masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Private Collections (2009-2010) and is in the process of co-curating, with her colleagues Robert Cozzolino and Julien Robson, Anatomy/Academy (2011) an exhibition that focuses on how Philadelphia’s dynamic art and science communities have fostered knowledge of the human body. Currently, Marley is organizing an international retrospective on Henry Ossawa Tanner (2012), as well as editing the catalog that will accompany the exhibition, to be published by the University of California Press.
In 2007, Marley curated the exhibition The Art of Edward L. Loper, Sr.: On the Path of the Masters for the University Museums of the University of Delaware as part of a larger project cataloging Delaware African-American artist Edward L. Loper’s life works. Prior to PAFA, Marley worked for both the National Gallery of Art and the National Park Service and held research fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Winterthur Museum, the Maryland Historical Society, and Colonial Williamsburg. While at USC she was co-curator of Global Address and author of “Here and Nowhere: Los Angeles, Globalization and Location,” and “Dead Country: Miles Coolidge’s Global Landscape” (USC Fisher Gallery, 2002).
Marley’s professional affiliations include the Association of Historians of American Art, Society of Early Americanists, and American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies.