A new director of collections and exhibitions has been selected for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Andrew Eschelbacher will join the Carter’s staff in September, museum officials announced Tuesday. Eschelbacher brings extensive experience managing international touring exhibits and current collections that showcase the masterworks of renowned American artists, including Ruth Asawa, Alexander Calder, Frederic Church, Stuart Davis, Robert Duncanson, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence and John Singer Sargent.
Eschelbacher, currently the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the American Federation of Arts (AFA) in New York City, will lead the museum’s Curatorial, Conservation, Registration, Art Services, Exhibitions Management, Publications, and Archives departments.
He will also oversee the museum’s exhibitions program as well as acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collection in collaboration with the leadership team and board of trustees, helping advance the museum’s goals.
“As director of collections and exhibitions, Andrew will advance the museum’s vision for this evolution and brings both the experience and foresight to drive our exhibition program forward as we continue to tell more inclusive stories of American creativity, said Andrew J. Walker, executive director of the Amon Carter.
“I am thrilled to be joining the Carter, a museum I have long admired for its deep connection to its communities and for its extraordinary collection and tradition of vanguard scholarship,” Eschelbacher said. “It is at the forefront of thinking about the role of a modern American museum, and I am eager to begin working with the Carter’s outstanding staff to explore the diversity and dynamism of American creativity.”
During his tenure at the AFA, Eschelbacher managed an ambitious program of more than 30 internationally traveling exhibitions, including Whitfield Lovell: Passages; African Modernism in America; Art and Activism at Tougaloo College; Xican–a.o.x. Body; and Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French.
Previously, Eschelbacher was a Chester Dale Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and served as an associate curator at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine for four years, where he oversaw the museum’s collection of European art as well as American sculpture, co-managing the David E. Shaw and Family Sculpture Park. During his tenure in Portland, he organized and managed more than a dozen exhibitions, including Americans Abroad, 1860–1915; Under Pressure: Art from the 1980s and A New American Sculpture: Lachaise, Laurent, Nadelman, and Zorach, co-organized with the Amon Carter Museum.
Eschelbacher was editor of the catalogue for A New American Sculpture as well as the book for the upcoming exhibit, Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French. He also contributed to many other publications.
Eschelbacher earned his bachelor’s degree from Davidson College, his master’s degree from Tulane University, and a doctorate degree from the University of Maryland, College Park.
In addition to its collection of American art, the Amon Carter has a large collection of American photography.