WICHITA, KAN.- Wichita Art Museum Director Dr. Patricia McDonnell has named Dr. Tera Hedrick as Curator, effective immediately. Her appointment concludes a national search.

“Tera exceeded every expectation, so much so that the museum ended its national search and selected her as the WAM curator for the museum’s next chapter,” said McDonnell. “Tera is an extraordinary talent, and we are fortunate to keep her in her hometown of Wichita. Her academic credentials are sterling, and she brings erudition and buoyant enthusiasm to her role as curator.”

Hedrick began work at WAM as a research fellow in Fall 2016, serving as the museum’s lead researcher and creator of the current exhibition No Idle Hands: Treasures from the Americana Collection at the Wichita Art Museum, highlighting the museum’s newly acquired Americana collection of more than 450 works of folk art that reflect daily life in America’s early history.

In May 2017, Hedrick was appointed Interim Curator and, in her short tenure at WAM, immediately developed exhibitions utilizing works from the museum’s collection, including No Idle Hands, Savoir Faire: 19th Century Fashion Prints, and Americans in Paris: The French Connection from the Wichita Art Museum Collection.

As Curator, Hedrick will be responsible for contributing to the creative programming of the collection, organizing exhibitions with related publications, and developing imaginative strategies for the meaningful engagement of museum visitors. Her curatorial appointment marks a key hire for the Wichita Art Museum, which recently celebrated its 80th anniversary and is coming off the year 2017 cresting the 70,000 mark in annual visitors, the highest yearly attendance in the last five years.

Hedrick’s academic credentials include a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Kansas in Lawrence and a Ph.D from the Department of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is a native of Wichita.

During her appointment as Interim Curator, Hedrick undertook the role of instructor in the School of Art, Design and Creative Industries at Wichita State University in Wichita, teaching Western Art History I and II. Previously, she taught Western Art History and Introduction to Modern Art classes in the School of the Arts at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and the Department of Art at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Prior to returning to Wichita, Hedrick was a visiting assistant professor of art history at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, part of the State University of New York (SUNY).

Her museum experience includes serving as the Kress Foundation Curatorial Intern in European and American Art for the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas and as a curatorial intern at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her academic work includes a pre-doctorial fellowship at the American Research Center in Sofia, Bulgaria, a Junior Residential Fellowship in the Research Center for Anatolia Civilizations at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and a Leventis Foundation Fellowship in the Gennadius Library at the American School for Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. Hedrick has a record of conference presentations, including the University of Haifa in Haifa, Israel, and at Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul, Turkey. She is fluent in English and French and has a reading knowledge of German.