Palmer Museum Curator Awarded Smithsonian Senior Fellowship

May 30, 2008

Leo Mazow, curator of American art at Penn State's Palmer Museum of Art and affiliate associate professor of art history, has been awarded a Smithsonian Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, D.C., for summer 2008. SAAM Fellows are selected in an annual competition administered by the museum and the Smithsonian's Office of Research Training and Services. While in residence at the museum, Mazow will work on his book project, Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound. He recently published a chapter of this study as an article titled “Regionalist Radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake” in The Art Bulletin (March 2008).

Mazow, who specializes in American art and cultural history, joined the Palmer Museum staff in 2002. Since then, he has curated and written the catalogues for such exhibitions as Arneson and the Object, John Covert Rediscovered and Picturing the Banjo. He is currently organizing the exhibition Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Painting for 2010. His articles on such topics as George Inness, New York Dada and American art patronage have appeared in the journals American Art, Winterthur Portfolio and Railroad Heritage, among others.

Contact: Amy Milgrub Marshall, alm157@psu.edu or 814.863.2104