Tacoma Art Museum Names New Curator of Western American Art
- TACOMA, Washington
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- June 21, 2016
After a nationwide search, Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) announces the appointment of Faith Brower as the Haub Curator of Western American Art. She will join the museum July 26, 2016. Brower will create, articulate, and execute a vision for TAM’s newest collection, the Haub Family Collection of Western American Art. In addition, she will shape the collecting and educational focus for the museum to more fully tell the story of the West in all its diversity and complexity.
“We are excited to welcome Faith to the museum,” said Stephanie Stebich, Executive Director of Tacoma Art Museum. “She brings expertise in American art of the West and contemporary Native American art to TAM. Faith will advance the appreciation and awareness of the Haub Collection nationally and internationally.”
Since 2012 Brower has served as Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the High Desert Museum (Bend, Oregon), Central Oregon’s premier museum. Brower has been accountable for the care and display of 29,000 objects in the permanent collection. The museum is acclaimed for its stewardship of the natural, historical and cultural resources of the high desert, including an impressive collection of western art. It also features wildlife, indoor and outdoor exhibits, living history performances and Native American artifacts. Brower’s recent exhibitions include Art for a Nation: Inspiration from the Great Depression and Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian. Brower also juries the art for the High Desert Museum’s annual Art of the West, a celebration of the art and culture of the region.
Brower nurtured important relationships with tribal institutions and individuals while at the High Desert Museum. In conjunction with the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, the museum collaborated on the exhibition Head to Toe: Language of Plateau Indian Clothing in 2013. She also established important working relationships with the individuals from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Brower helped facilitate a blessing of the collection, and they collaboratively developed a collecting plan for the High Desert Museum.
In addition to her role at the High Desert Museum, Brower’s previous museum experience includes several key curatorial roles at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, CA from 2004–2009, and several key freelance opportunities in research and exhibition production. Faith holds a Master’s Degree in Art History from San Francisco State University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
“I am honored to join the Tacoma Art Museum, and am looking forward to becoming a part of the Tacoma community,” said Brower. “To be able to build and shape the Haub Family Collection of Western American art through dynamic exhibitions and strategic gifts and purchases is a unique opportunity. This extraordinary collection deserves to be better recognized nationally and internationally through touring exhibitions and additional critical scholarship.”
The Haub Collection of Western American Art features outstanding works that embrace and elucidate the cultural history of the American West including the work of significant historic painters, such as grand manner landscape painters Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran; titans of the genre, Frederic Remington and Charles Russell; magnificent early portraits by Gilbert Stuart, Henry Inman, and Charles Bird King; and works by master artists of the Taos School such as Catharine Critcher, E. Martin Hennings and Ernest Blumenschein. The collection also contains works by notable modernist painters, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Henri, and Maynard Dixon as well as more contemporary artists such as Clyde Aspevig, Tom Lovell, John Nieto, Bill Schenck, and Mian Situ. The works range in date from the late 1790s to the present.
This significant donation of iconic works, announced in July 2012, has transformed Tacoma Art Museum into one of the leading museums in the country featuring western American art. TAM is currently the only Pacific Northwest institution to hold a collection of this caliber, providing an entirely new dimension of cultural offerings to Tacoma as well as the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest.
