SAINT LOUIS, MO.- Jason T. Busch will join the Saint Louis Art Museum as deputy director for curatorial affairs and museum programs, overseeing its curatorial, exhibitions and collections, and education and public programs divisions, the Museum announced today. He assumes his duties in October.

Busch, 38, currently is chief curator and the Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. In that role, Busch curates the Carnegie’s decorative arts and design collections, as well as oversees its curatorial, conservation, registration, and art preparation and installation departments.

Busch will take a leadership position at the Museum at a transformative moment. The Saint Louis Art Museum last month opened its Sir David Chipperfield-designed East Building, an expansion that improves visitor amenities and increases public space by about 30 percent.

“I am honored to join the Saint Louis Art Museum as the institution embarks upon an auspicious chapter in its history with the opening of the acclaimed East Building,” Busch said. “The depth and breadth of the collection, as well as the high level of talent and scholarship of museum staff, is indeed impressive. I look forward to working with my colleagues in further shaping national and international collaborations, developing new audiences, and enhancing the reputation of one of America's greatest comprehensive art museums.”

Museum Director Brent R. Benjamin said Busch’s appointment was the result of an international search.

“I am confident that, after years of expansion planning and construction, Jason’s leadership will help the Museum make the most of its new campus by sharpening our mission-driven focus of offering great art and educational opportunities to the people of St. Louis and the world.” Benjamin said.

Prior to joining the Carnegie, Busch was associate curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where he helped oversee its architecture, design, decorative arts, craft and sculpture collections. He also served as assistant curator of American decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn.

Busch has lectured and published extensively, and has organized numerous installations and exhibitions, notably Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939, which currently is on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Fittingly, Busch will work at a campus that includes the Cass Gilbert-designed Main Building, originally built as the Palace of Fine Arts for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

While in Minneapolis, he organized Currents of Change: Art and Life Along the Mississippi River, 1850-1861, an exhibition that featured several important loans from the Saint Louis Art Museum, including The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley. Busch also was the project director for the installation of the Grand Salon from the Hotel Gaillard de La Bouëxière (Paris, about 1735), which included the supervision of nearly two years of conservation work undertaken in France and the solicitation of some $700,000 in private and foundation funds in support of the project. Coincidentally, the Minneapolis room originates in the same Parisian mansion as the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Cabinet, which is installed on Level 1 of the Main Building.

Busch holds an undergraduate degree in American Studies from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he graduated magna cum laude. He holds both his graduate degree and a certificate in Museum Studies from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware in Newark, Del. Busch recently completed the fellowship program of the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City.