CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago announced that Gloria Groom, the David and Mary Winton Green Curator in the Department of Medieval through Modern European Painting and Sculpture, has been named the museum’s first senior curator. This new position acknowledges Groom’s significant contributions to the museum and reflects her exemplary work across the range of curatorial responsibilities, including scholarship, exhibitions, acquisitions, research initiatives, development, and collaboration with international institutions and colleagues.

“It gives me great pleasure to name Gloria Groom as the Art Institute’s first senior curator,” said Douglas Druick, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the museum. “I have worked closely with Gloria for many years and have seen first-hand her creativity, intelligence, energy, and curatorial acumen. Her stewardship of the Art Institute’s collection of French 19th-century painting and sculpture has distinguished the museum nationally and internationally, allowing us to present such exhibitions as her current Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, a collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This exhibition is just the latest of Gloria’s many achievements, but it exemplifies her talents as a scholar and a colleague.”

Groom joined the Art Institute as a research assistant in 1984 and served as an assistant, then associate curator of European painting. In 1988, she was appointed the David and Mary Winton Green Curator, overseeing the museum’s renowned collection of 19th-century painting and sculpture. An expert in French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, especially the work of artists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, Groom has published extensively in catalogues and journals. She is the author of the monograph Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator: Patrons and Projects, 1892–1912 (1993) and author and editor of, among other works, Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 (2001) and Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2012). Additionally she is the coeditor and coauthor of The Age of French Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Art Institute of Chicago (2008). She spearheaded the creation of the Art Institute’s first two online scholarly catalogues—focused on the Art Institute’s holdings of Monet and Renoir paintings and to be published next year—which provide in-depth curatorial research and conservation science to a global audience as part of the Getty Foundation–led Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative. Groom has curated and co-curated 11 exhibitions at the Art Institute, including Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2013); Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (2006–07); and Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist (1995). In June of this year, she was named Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her significant contributions to French art and culture. A member of the Midwest Art Historians Society, the Arts Club of Chicago, and the Association for Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art, Groom also has served as a trustee for the Association of Art Curators since 2009. She received her B.A. from the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Groom received a diploma from the École du Louvre and was a 2009 Fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership.