Congratulations to Doctor Harper Montgomery for being appointed director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and named the Susan and David Bershad Professor of Art History. Montgomery's expertise in Latin American art and her dedication to curatorial education make her an excellent choice for this post, and we look forward to seeing the Hunter galleries thrive under her leadership.

Before being named to this position, Montgomery served as the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Distinguished Lecturer in Latin American Art at Hunter College, as part of a partnership between Hunter College, Fundación Cisneros, and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC). The goal of this partnership was to transform the teaching and development of Latin American art at Hunter and more broadly in the United States.

As the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Distinguished Lecturer in Latin American Art at Hunter, Montgomery took advantage of the unprecedented access she could offer students to the CPPC's holdings to do in-depth research and develop scholarly proposals for exhibitions.

Among the exhibitions Montgomery worked on was Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists' Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (October 30, 2015–January 23, 2016), which was the culmination of a multi-year collaborative effort between Hunter College, The Graduate Center at CUNY, Americas Society, and the CPPC. For Hunter’s contribution to the exhibition, Montgomery taught the MA and MFA seminar, Imagining the Latin American Landscape: The Nineteenth-Century Gaze, during which the students studied the artworks in person, produced original research on their assigned works, and collectively conceived of the exhibition's narrative, checklist, and catalog.

Another notable exhibition curated by Montgomery alongside Hunter MA and MFA students enrolled in the Advanced Curatorial Certificate is Copy, Translate, Repeat: Contemporary Art from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (February 8–April 1, 2018). This exhibition featured international artists in the CPPC’s Contemporary collection who utilize a variety of appropriative strategies for making art.

In addition to her new roles, Montgomery is also a member of the Advisory Board for The Museum of Modern Art's Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America. She was involved in conceiving the Institute's latest seminar, Ambivalent Relations: Latin American Artists Responding to Marcel Duchamp during the 1960s and '70s.

We wish Harper Montgomery the best and are excited to see how she will lead the Hunter College Art Galleries to even greater heights.