BALTIMORE, MD.- Doreen Bolger, Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art, has announced the appointment of Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, Ph.D. as Associate Curator and Department Head of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Pacific Islands.

Gunsch comes to the BMA after having held a variety of curatorial and teaching positions. Over the past several years, she worked as a Graduate Intern at Grey Gallery at New York University during the exhibition Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art and taught as an Adjunct Instructor of art history at Marymount Manhattan College, Montclair State University, and New York University. She most recently studied as the Erwin Panofsky Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where her dissertation centered on the original installation pattern for 900 bronze plaques from the 16th-and 17th-century Benin Court, located in present-day Nigeria. She began her academic career at American University. Gunsch’s recent scholarship has focused on museum practice and collection histories. Her article under review for African Arts, “Art and/or Ethnographica? The Reception of Benin Works from 1897-1935,” outlines the history of Benin art in German ethnographic collections.

“We are thrilled that Kathryn has joined us at such a pivotal moment in the BMA’s history,” said BMA Director Doreen Bolger. “The ambitious $24.5 million renovation currently underway will culminate with the renovation and reinstallation of the Museum’s outstanding African collection. Kathryn’s leadership of this project will help us bring updated scholarship, fresh educational perspectives, thoughtful design, and innovative uses of technology to better showcase these remarkable objects.”

In addition to planning the reinstallation of the Museum’s esteemed African collection, Gunsch’s responsibilities at the BMA will include managing the department of the arts of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Pacific Islands; developing exhibitions, public programs, and new interpretive strategies for the collection.

“I am honored to work for a Museum with such a great collection of African art,” said Kathryn Gunsch. “I look forward to presenting these celebrated works in new, expanded galleries so that museum visitors can even better appreciate them.”