Banner Image: Robert Jessup, Deluge and Salvage, 1985
Barbara Matilsky developed a deep connection to nature during summers at her grandparent’s bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. The calm of laying down in mossy outcrops and thrill of surveying land from tree tops inspired her spirit for exploration.
When Barbara later discovered the beauty of landscape painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her professional career path began to crystallize. For her PhD thesis at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, she researched the relationship between 19th century alpine and polar images and the emerging field of natural science.
During her thirty years as a museum curator, Barbara organized exhibitions that address the intersection of art, natural history, and environmental issues. In 1986, she began her career at the Queens Museum of Art in New York City. Here she organized several exhibitions, including Classical Myth and Imagery in Contemporary Art and Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions that toured the United States with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.
In 1996, Barbara was appointed Curator of Exhibitions at the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she organized more than twenty wide-ranging exhibitions, including Buddhist Art and Ritual in Nepal and Tibet, Five Artists-Five Faiths: Spirituality in Contemporary Art, and Illuminations: Contemporary Film and Video Art.
As the first art curator of the Whatcom Museum’s Lightcatcher building from 2009-2018, Barbara organized the international traveling exhibition, Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art 1775-2012 and Endangered Species: Artists on the Front Line of Biodiversity.
Barbara recently curated the retrospective exhibition, Jyoti Duwadi, Himalaya to Cascadia: Transcending Boundaries for Western Washington University’s Western Gallery in 2023. In 2024, she began organizing a series of exhibitions, Women Rising, in conjunction with the Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival in Bellingham, Washington.
REFLECTIONS OF A CURATOR / ART HISTORIAN
I can trace my first meaningful art experience to the fourth grade when my mother took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see paintings by the French Impressionists. I was awed by their shimmering colors and seemingly magical compositions. But it wasn’t until my second year in college at the State University of New York at Albany that I knew my life would revolve around the arts.
At first I was keen on becoming a lawyer dedicated to social justice issues. But after attending a philosophy course illustrated with slides of artworks referencing the history of ideas, I was intrigued. I could look at works of art and learn about the world. During my Introduction to Art History class, the professor presented images of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. His Moonrise over the Sea mesmerized and transported me into a sublime other world. I experienced the sensation of actually being in the painting and, at that point, began charting my professional career.
Attending New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), I received a stellar education by professors, some of whom worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. I also believe that living in New York City profoundly influenced the direction of my career. When not in class, I spent my days exploring museums and galleries. At the time, I did not realize that I was training my eye, determining how artworks looked in relationship to each other. Most importantly, I began thinking about how to tell a story through art. I was not interested in concentrating on a particular artist, but rather on a work’s cultural context as it related to the important social and environmental issues of the time.
One afternoon, Robert Rosenblum, my mentor at the IFA, shared a photo of a surreal arctic landscape by Francois Auguste Biard (1799-1882) that was exhibited in the 1841 Paris Salon. He wisely counseled that Caspar David Friedrich’s art was well renowned, but Biard was on nobody’s radar. I could make a significant contribution to the field if I centered my work around his.
In 1980 I lived in Paris for almost a year while researching my doctoral dissertation: Sublime Landscape Painting in 19th Century France: Alpine and Arctic Iconography and its Relationship to Natural History. I scoured the archive to find information about Biard and discovered documents that led me to that artist’s majestic mural project at the Museum of Natural History. In 1985, I published an article about Biard’s work in the Gazette des Beaux Arts titled, Francois August Biard: Artist-Naturalist-Explorer. According to contemporary scholars who are delving more deeply into his paintings, my work helped lay the foundation for their own in-depth study.
This early research was instrumental in formulating the Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art 1775-2012 exhibition. The show debuted at the Whatcom Museum and traveled to the El Paso Museum of Art, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and the Glenbow in Calgary.
While studying at the Institute of Fine Arts, I interned at the Drawing Center when it was still a fledgling institution on 137 Greene Street under its founder Martha Beck. Collaborating with a grants writer, I learned about fundraising by spending many hours researching at New York City’s Foundation Center (now called Candid). During this period, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hired me to fan out into New York City’s boroughs and present slide lectures at high schools and colleges on the Treasures of Tuthankhamun exhibition in 1976. I also helped research the work of Edward Hopper for the Whitney Museum of American Art where curator Gail Levin was organizing the exhibition Edward Hopper: Prints and Illustrations (1979). For a while, I taught art history as an adjunct professor at various institutions, including Montclair College and Pace University.
