Gilcrease Museum - Assistant Curator Culture and Community

Gilcrease Museum - Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community

Gilcrease Museum, which houses an interdisciplinary collection representing the diverse heritage of the Americas, seeks an intellectually curious, creative, and self-motivated individual to be Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community
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The Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community is a new curatorial role, charged with leading exhibitions, acquisitions, research, and interpretation within Gilcrease’s collections of historical American fine art, visual culture, material culture, manuscripts, archives, and rare books, together numbering more than 300,000 items. Utilizing broad staff expertise, Gilcrease studies and shares these through multiple intersecting scholarly perspectives and methodological frameworks.

The focus of the Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community will be questions of identity, politics, and cultural expression from the past, using rigorous research and dynamic storytelling to convey the relevance of historical objects to contemporary audiences.

Objects of study for the Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community will include some of Gilcrease’s most esteemed collections areas. Many of the Museum’s best-know items pertain to the history of European settlement in the Americas and to interactions between the settlers and Native nations in the present-day United States. These include superb examples of colonial-era and nineteenth-century portraiture, history paintings, genre paintings, and sculptures in marble and bronze, with pockets of strength in works by Charles Bird King, George Catlin, Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and members of the Taos Society of Artists.

In addition, the Museum collects materials and hosts research on military history and diplomacy, the transatlantic slave trade, religion in the Americas, histories of transportation and urbanization, the Civil Rights Movement, and changing roles for women in American society. Documents and artworks speaking to the history of Oklahoma are another area of depth, including items concerning the forced removal of Native tribes to this region and about the 1921 Tula Race Massacre.

The Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community will be a key point of contact for researchers and exhibition opportunities in these diverse fields, while initiating projects based on the curator’s personal expertise and interests.

The Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community will participate on a seven-member curatorial team and collaborate with other museum departments, reporting to the Director of Curatorial Affairs. Primary duties include researching and cataloguing the collection; recommending historical items and collections for acquisition; developing dynamic long-term, temporary, and traveling exhibitions; identifying and bringing traveling exhibitions to Gilcrease; and raising national and international visibility for Gilcrease’s work and for its collections.

This role will also partner with Gilcrease’s Associate Curator for Contemporary Culture and Community to activate the Museum’s collections in support of projects with living artists, including participants in the Artist-in-Residence program, and with community collaborators.

The Assistant Curator for Historical Culture and Community will join Gilcrease as the Museum prepares for its public reopening in early 2027 in a new 83,500-square-foot building. With this watershed moment Gilcrease is also embracing an intersectional approach to managing and displaying its 300,000+ objects. This includes interdisciplinary galleries that juxtapose objects from different times, places, and cultures, as well as increased attention…