Name Anne Tucker | Role Museum curator | |
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Education State University of New York at Brockport (1972) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Books The History of Japanese, Chaotic Harmony: Contemp, Louis Faurer, American classroom, The Great Wall of China Similar People Kotaro Iizawa, Naoyuki Kinoshita, Nathan Lyons, Richard Howard, Catherine Wagner | ||
AIPAD Talks - Anne Wilkes Tucker
Anne Wilkes Tucker was an American museum curator of photographic works. She retired in June 2015.
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Life and work
Tucker was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She received a B.A. in Art History from Randolph Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1967, and an A.A.S in photographic illustration from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1968. In 1972, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Photographic History from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, studying under Nathan Lyons and Beaumont Newhall.
While in graduate school, she worked as a research assistant at the George Eastman House in Rochester; as a research associate at the Gernsheim Collection at the University of Texas, Austin; and as a curatorial intern in the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York with a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.
Tucker has worked for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) since 1976, when it possessed virtually no photographs. In February 1976, Target Stores made its first donation to MFAH to begin the Target Collection of American Photography. The MFAH Photography department was established in December 1976, when Tucker was hired as a consultant to act as curator of photography. In 1978, she became the MFAH curator and in 1984 she was named the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography. She has increased the museum's holdings of photographs to over 24,000 in 2008.
Tucker has organized more than forty exhibitions for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and elsewhere, including retrospectives for Brassaï, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, George Krause, Ray Metzker, and Richard Misrach; as well as surveys on Czech avant-garde photography, a survey of the history of Japanese photography, and a selection from the Allan Chasanoff Collection.
Many of her exhibitions have led to the publication of catalogues and books of photographs. Her book The Woman's Eye includes the work of ten women photographers: Gertrude Käsebier, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Barbara Morgan, Diane Arbus, Alisa Wells, Judy Dater and Bea Nettles. Tucker states, "The Woman's Eye represents the first major attempt to bring together notable photographs by women and to consider, through them, the role played by sexual identity both in the creation and the evaluation of photographic art." In a 2003 interview with Texas Monthly Magazine she comments: "When I wrote The Woman's Eye in 1973, very few women photographers were accepted in the elite of the field. That is no longer true. Photography has also had many important women as photo historians and curators. Nancy Newhall, Alison Gernsheim, Gisèle Freund, and Grace Mayer were some of the important early women historians. I knew Nancy Newhall and Grace Mayer and admired both very much."