TOLEDO, OH.- The Toledo Museum of Art has named Erin Corrales-Diaz its new curator of American art. Corrales-Diaz begins her appointment at TMA in November 2021. In her role, she will steward TMA’s renowned holdings of American art and will also collaborate with the curatorial team on the reinstallation of the Museum’s collections, with an aim to broaden art historical narratives for a more accessible and inclusive experience.

“Erin brings fresh and original insights to American art history,” said Adam Levine, the Edward Drummond and Florence Scott Libbey director and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art. “Her important perspective will expand our vision of what defines American art. We’re excited to have her voice on our curatorial team, and we look forward to her contributions to expanding the canon and engaging our community.”

“This is an exciting time to join the creative and ambitious team at the Toledo Museum of Art,” Corrales-Diaz said. “I believe curatorial work is part of the civic sphere, and I look forward to engaging with local Toledo communities to ensure the Museum is a place for everyone. It will be an honor to oversee such an incredible collection of American art, with works by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Winslow Homer and Ralph Albert Blakelock, while expanding and questioning what constitutes American art in this present moment.”

Corrales-Diaz’s professional accomplishments include authoring the first major effort to historicize the visual culture of war-related disability, a significant deviation from previous scholarship around the American Civil War, which focused on the death toll. In “Remembering the Veteran: Disability, Trauma, and the American Civil War, 1861-1915,” her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she explored the complex ways American artists interpreted war-induced disability after the Civil War, and how these representations came to embody the overwhelming sense of loss Americans experienced in the war’s aftermath.

In her other published writings, she has examined the fashion history of the baseball jersey, N.C. Wyeth’s images of Native Americans, and the gendered color line that exists for women artists and the way their histories are told.

She comes to TMA from the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she served as assistant curator of American art from 2018 to 2021. There she curated exhibitions including Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere and The Iconic Jersey: Baseball x Fashion.

In addition to her Ph.D., Corrales-Diaz completed a Master of Arts in art history from Williams College and a Bachelor of Arts in art history from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she graduated with full college honors cum laude.