Dr. Catherine Walworth
Dr. Walworth joined the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in 2022. She is a specialist in modern art whose research blends social and political history, material culture, fashion, early film, and dance. Walworth has brought her interests to bear by organizing AMFA’s exhibition Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina, which will embark on its national tour in 2026, and editing its accompanying catalog featuring new research and original scholarship on each artist.
Walworth’s other AMFA exhibitions include Path to Abstraction: Picasso, Braque, and Cubism’s Impact on Modern Art (2023-2024), Risa Hricovsky: Then is Now (2023-2024), Tricia Wright: The Naturalist (2024), and Kwame Brathwaite: The 1970s (2025). In addition to her curating, Walworth has stewarded new acquisitions for the AMFA Foundation Collection by artists such as Perle Fine and Sudarshan Shetty.
Prior to AMFA, Walworth served as curator at the Columbia Museum of Art, where she organized modern and contemporary exhibitions, including Renee Cox: Soul Culture (2017-2018), Jackson Pollock: Mural (2018–2019), and The Ironic Curtain: Art from the Soviet Underground (2021).
She began her career at the Seattle Art Museum, and has held curatorial positions supporting traveling exhibition and catalogue projects, including Silver to Steel: The Modern Designs of Peter Muller-Munk at Carnegie Museum of Art (2015); Artistic Luxury: Fabergé, Tiffany, Lalique (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2008); and High Drama: Eugene Berman and the Legacy of the Melancholic Sublime (McNay Art Museum, 2004).
She received a doctorate in art history from The Ohio State University, a Master of Arts degree from the University of Washington, and a bachelor’s degree in Art, History, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Cornell College. Her book Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism (Penn State University Press, 2017) was short-listed for a First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association in 2018. She also co-authored (with Dr. Susan Felleman) a chapter examining fashion, art, and objects in the 1939 MGM film Ninotchka in New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch: A Light Touch (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).
