PURCHASE, NY.- Tracy Fitzpatrick recently joined the Neuberger Museum of Art staff as Adjunct Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The Museum is situated on the Purchase College, State University of New York campus, and this position is a joint appointment with the Humanities Division at Purchase College, where Dr. Fitzpatrick serves as Assistant Professor of Art History, teaching mainly in the Masters Program in Modern and Contemporary Art but also at the undergraduate level.

At the Museum, Fitzpatrick will organize special and permanent collection exhibitions, help expand the Neuberger’s role within the curriculum of the College, and build on its public programming for the campus and the larger community. The first exhibition she will curate for the Neuberger Museum is Facing Abstraction: Figurative Traditions in the Twentieth Century. On view during Winter/Spring 2006, this exhibition will be drawn from the Museum’s rich collections of paintings, prints, and sculpture. Much of twentieth century art has been measured in relation to the development of abstraction. By the 1950s many Abstract Expressionist painters viewed the idea of three-dimensional representation on a two-dimensional surface as suspect, questioning the very relevance of representational imagery at all. Facing Abstraction traces an alternate art history, one in which faces and figures, although abstracted and distorted (and even sometimes barely recognizable) remained essential. The exhibition includes work in a variety of styles by artists including Alexander Archipenko, Grace Hartigan, Rufino Tamayo, and Larry Rivers.

Dr. Fitzpatrick’s curricular initiatives include the development of a concentration in museum studies, which will train students in curatorship, exhibition design, and programming. This course of study will draw on the Neuberger’s staff, physical plant, and collections, and focus on issues related to the display and interpretation of objects. To grow the Museum’s campus-based programming, Dr. Fitzpatrick initiated First Wednesdays at the Neu, which will make the Neuberger available to faculty, students, and staff during extended hours and provide a local respite to the Purchase College community.

While earning a BA in English and Art History cum laude from Tufts University, Dr. Fitzpatrick served as an intern at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Vose Gallery Archives, and the Christopher Wood Gallery, London. Upon receiving her degree she began an eight-year career at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) where as an Assistant Curator she curated and organized numerous exhibitions. Her 1995 show, Artful Advocacy: Cartoons from the Woman Suffrage Movement receive critical acclaim, appearing in national newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and Washington Times. During this time, Fitzpatrick earned her MA degree in Art History from The George Washington University.

With the support of a Henry Luce Foundation American Art Dissertation Fellowship, Dr. Fitzpatrick completed her thesis on the visual culture of the New York City subway between 1904 and 1941. An abbreviated version of her work on subway imagery was the subject of the exhibition Underground Art, 1925-1950: A Centennial Celebration of the New York City Subway, curated last fall for the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York. Fitzpatrick’s fully illustrated book on the visual culture of the subway is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2007.

While at Rutgers, Fitzpatrick also served as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Zimmerli Museum of Art where she curated exhibitions out of the print collection including Another Dimension: Sculptors as Printmakers and Traffic Patterns: Prints by American Artists in the Age of the Machine. Just prior to arriving at Purchase, Dr. Fitzpatrick served as a Part-Time Lecturer in Art History at Kean University, Union, NJ and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the History of Art Department at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.