NOTRE DAME, IN.- The Snite Museum of Art announce Cheryl Snay as curator of European art. Snay was the associate curator of European art at The Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, where she worked for six years with their collection of Old Master and nineteenth-century prints, drawings and paintings. Most recently, she has organized an exhibition and a catalog of approximately sixty drawings dating from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries entitled Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings from The Blanton Museum of Art. This exhibition will open in February 2011 at the Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh before being presented at The Blanton Museum of Art and at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University.

In 2007, she organized A Century of Grace: 19th-Century Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art-an exhibition of fifty paintings, sculptures, and drawings examining the role of the figure in academic art during the period of transition to Modernism. Her contributions to the field of nineteenth-century visual studies began when she collaborated on a multi-faceted project, The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, consisting of an exhibition, catalog, and on-line searchable database that was jointly produced in 2005 by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum.

She earned her Ph.D. in art history from Pennsylvania State University, University Park; a M.A. in art history from Michigan State University, East Lansing; and a B.A. in journalism from Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan.

Snay's expertise in nineteenth-century visual culture in France with an emphasis on the academy will serve the Snite Museum well in interpreting our Noah L. and Muriel Butkin Collection of 19th-century French art; and her keen eye for drawings will support our continued efforts to develop, exhibit, publish, and interpret our fine Old Master drawing collection. Snay has a demonstrated commitment to the unique role of university art museums; she has already expressed her intention to develop insightful exhibitions, publications, symposia, and classes in cooperation with University faculty and students. Moreover, her engagement with the academic and scholarly communities both in the United States and abroad promises to help raise Notre Dame's national and international profile.

Snay hopes to develop thematic exhibitions that broaden ideas about art and serve to inspire intellectually curious Museum visitors.