SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS.-The McNay Art Museum is please to announce the appointment of Rene Paul Barilleaux, former Deputy Director for Programs at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, as the museum’s Curator of Art after 1945.

Serving for 12 years in Jackson, first as Chief Curator and then as Deputy Director, Barilleaux was instrumental in developing the museum’s contemporary art programs. In 1987, he instituted the Mississippi Invitational, an exhibition survey of artists living and working across the state. Barilleaux also established the Works in Progress series of solo contemporary shows and organized major Mississippi artists’ retrospectives that included pattern and decoration painter Valerie Jaudon and abstract expressionist Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

Barilleaux organized a number of national exhibitions including Passionate Observer: Photographs by Eudora Welty, presented at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., in 2003, and Unfolding Light: The Evolution of Ten Holographers, at the MIT Museum in 1997. His catalogue for the retrospective exhibition Valerie Jaudon was recognized for excellence in publishing by the Art Libraries Society of North America/Southeast Chapter.

Barilleaux received his B.F.A magna cum laude from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, and a M.F.A from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, in painting and art history. He began his museum career as an intern and technician at the Cooper-Hewitt, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design. He later served as Curator for Collections and Exhibitions at the Museum of Holography in New York and as Curator of Exhibitions at the Madison Art Center, Wisconsin.

Barilleaux was also an adjunct instructor in contemporary art and museum studies at Millsaps College in Jackson.

William J. Chiego, Director, said in announcing the recent appointment, “I am very pleased to bring someone with Rene’s breadth of knowledge and experience to the McNay. He has a great reputation for working with artists and the public and for bringing a variety of critical voices to the exhibiting and collecting of contemporary art.”