Barbara Haskell


Barbara Haskell is an American art historian and a museum curator. She is currently a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she has worked since 1975. She has previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Art and Pasadena Museum. She has a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her area of expertise is early to mid-20th-century painting and sculpture, including American Modernists, Abstract Expressionists, and Pop artists. She is the founder and leader of the American Fellows, a patrons group for major donors to the Whitney.
Among the landmark thematic exhibitions she has curated are BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958–1964, The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–1950, and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945. In addition, she has curated retrospectives and authored accompanying scholarly monographs on a range of early-20th-century and post-war American artists, including H.C. Westermann, Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, Charles Demuth, Red Grooms, Donald Judd, Burgoyne Diller, Agnes Martin, Joseph Stella, Edward Steichen, Elie Nadelman, Oscar Bluemner, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lyonel Feininger, Robert Indiana, Stuart Davis, and Grant Wood.

Major publications and exhibitions