WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.- The Clark Art Institute announces the appointment of Sarah Grandin to a newly created position as the Clark-Getty Curatorial Fellow. The Clark is one of a select group of international museums to receive a grant through The Paper Project, a Getty Foundation initiative aimed at providing training and professional development for early- to mid-career works-on-paper curators.
Grandin’s appointment provides a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, during which she will assist in the development of a planned 2022–23 exhibition of eighteenth-century French drawings in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In addition to working on this ambitious exhibition, organizing a related Study Day, and contributing to the accompanying catalogue, Grandin will play a key role in the work of the Clark’s Manton Study Center for Works on Paper and will participate in a full range of curatorial activities.
“It is an honor for the Clark to receive the Getty Foundation’s grant to create this exciting fellowship opportunity, and we are confident that Sarah Grandin will be an invaluable addition to our curatorial team,” said Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. “Sarah is an exceptional scholar and will bring great enthusiasm and energy to her work at the Clark. We are eager to collaborate on an exhibition from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s collection that is sure to make a significant contribution to our field.”
The Getty Foundation launched The Paper Project in 2018 as an effort to strengthen curatorial practice in the graphic arts field internationally. The Paper Project was conceived to help prints and drawings curators navigate the demands of the twenty-first-century museum, both by preserving traditional skills that have been passed down through generations of specialists, and by making their collections accessible to today's museum audiences. To date, The Paper Project has provided grants to twenty-seven museums throughout the world for projects including curatorial and research fellowships, exhibition and publishing projects, and the development of traveling seminars, professional workshops, and symposia.
“I am thrilled to hone my skills as a curator of graphic arts at the Clark through the Getty Paper Project fellowship,” said Grandin. “The collaborative exhibition the Clark has launched to shed light on eighteenth-century French drawings at the Bibliothèque nationale de France is ambitious and important. I also look forward to exploring works at the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper, and to getting to know the talented members of the Clark and Williams College communities. To experience such exciting intellectual exchange in a beautiful natural setting is a dream come true.”
Grandin will receive her PhD in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University in 2021; her dissertation focuses on issues of scale in the graphic and decorative arts in the age of Louis XIV. She holds a bachelor’s degree in art history and comparative literature from Stanford University. From 2017 to 2019, Grandin was a visiting fellow at the Ecole normale supériure in Paris, one of the most selective and prestigious graduate schools in France. While pursuing her education, Grandin participated in the development of exhibitions presented at both Stanford and Harvard.
