Matthew Hargraves, Chief Curator of Art Collections at the Yale Center for British Art is set to leave his position after sixteen years.

BY KAZAD

NEW HAVEN, CT— After more than sixteen years, Matthew Hargraves, Chief Curator of Art Collections at the Yale Center for British Art is set to leave his position. His last day is February 2021. Hargraves joined the Yale Center for British Art in 2005 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Paintings and Sculpture. That marked the beginning of a career spanning almost two decades.

As a Postdoctoral Research Associate, Hargraves authored a volume on Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (Yale University Press, 2007). In 2008, he joined the Yale Department for Collections Information and Access (CIA) as the Assistant Curator for Collections Research. He rose to become the head of that department in 2011.

Yale’s Art Collections Information

As head of the CIA, Hargraves was committed to making Yale’s art collection accessible to many. Consequently, he worked on developing the first online catalog of the Center’s collections. The success of the catalog project continues to be one of Hargraves major achievements.

Matthew Hargraves dedication, focus, and tenacity to making art accessible to many people got due attention. Soon, he was promoted to Chief Curator of Art Collections. In his new position, Hargraves worked alongside Scott Wilcox, in the reinstallation of the Center’s collection, Britain in the World (2016). In his leading role on the reinstallation project, Hargraves ensured the placement of more than 500 works from the collections into a chronological narrative emphasizing the global contexts of British art.

It is easy to declare Hargraves tenure as Chief Curator of Art Collections at the Yale Center for British Art successful. His list of curatorial achievements is long. In 2010, he curated Varieties of Romantic Experience, an exhibition that included more than 200 northern European drawings from the collection of Charles Ryskamp.  It was accompanied by an edited volume. Hargraves followed with Connections in 2011, an exhibition of the Center’s collections marking the launch of the online collections catalog.

A Devoted Curator

Hargraves is a curator devoted to looking for new ways to expand how people experience art. His 2019 exhibition Migrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain is seminal in his pursuit of creating new experiences for art lovers. It was the first exhibition dedicated to exploring film and video art at the Center. Subsequently, Hargraves collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als on two major exhibitions. The shows feature the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (2019) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a 2011 Yale MFA graduate.  Akunyili Crosby exhibition is presently on hold due to the coronavirus.

To add context to Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition, Hargraves organized a loan of Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Yiadom-Boakye. Installed in the Center’s fourth-floor galleries, the portrait depicts Yiadom-Boakye holding a rifle after a successful hunting experience. On the ground around her are five dead rabbits.  The portrait is mimetic of a small portrait by George Romney from 1760 in the collection of Tate Britain.   

 Love, Life, Death, and Desire: An Installation of the Center’s Collections is one of Hargraves recent exhibitions. The show celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Damien Hirst’s installation In and Out of Love (1991).

No doubt, Matthew Hargraves will be missed for his contribution to the growth of the Yale Center for British Art. Martina Droth, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Center was candid about her emotions. “Matthew’s dedication to stewarding the Center’s collections and his deep knowledge and expertise in British art will be greatly missed,” she said.  

About Matthew Hargraves

An art scholar, Hargraves holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and a BA from the University of Warwick. His dissertation Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain was published as a book in 2006 by the Yale University Press. Hargraves dissertation was shortlisted for the William M. B. Berger Prize for British Art History.

Through the years, Hargraves has published other titles. In 2014, he co-authored A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany with Rachel Sloan. His most recent work is an essay on William Blake in the exhibition catalog William Blake: Visionary (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020).

Hargraves was awarded the Lowell Libson Morgan Courtauld Fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum in 2013. In 2017, he contributed to Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection, which published by the Morgan Library and accompanied by an exhibition.