Kevin W. Tucker

The Margot B. Perot Curator of Decorative Arts and Design
of the Dallas Museum of Art

Kevin William Tucker joined the Dallas Museum of Art as Curator of Decorative Arts and Design in June 2003. He has more than 16 years of experience in the field and is a specialist in American decorative arts and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tucker came to the Dallas Museum of Art from the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, where he most recently served as Chief Curator and Deputy Director. Tucker also served as the Columbia Museum of Art’s Curator of Decorative Arts (2000-2002), Associate Curator for Decorative Arts (1996–1999), and Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts (1994–1996). In addition to his work in Columbia, Tucker served as Curator of Decorative Arts & Owens-Thomas House at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia (1999–2000).

Between 1996 and 1999, Tucker was responsible for the most significant growth in the decorative arts collections in the history of the Columbia Museum of Art, assembling outstanding holdings in twentieth century art glass and contemporary craft and design. He worked with staff, consultants, architects, and gallery designers to install the museum’s decorative arts collections within a new 85,000-square-foot museum facility, which was completed in 1998. Tucker has served on the board of the Curators Committee (CURCOM) of the American Association of Museums, as a reviewer for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Institute of Museum and Library Services, and has been involved with various professional committees of the Southeastern Museums Conference and South Carolina Federation of Museums.

In addition to organizing the forthcoming retrospective of one of the seminal figures of early 20th-century design, Gustav Stickley and the American Arts and Crafts Movement, Tucker has lectured and written on various aspects of modern design and is the Dallas Museum of Art’s project director, co-curator, and editor for the new nationally-touring exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Modernism in American Silver: 20th-Century Design (2005). In addition, he recently co-curated the exhibitions There and Back Again: Selections from the Graham D. Willford Collection of American Art (2005), Imperial Taste: Chinese Porcelain for the Western Trade (2005), curated Through the Needle’s Eye: American Quilts from the Permanent Collection of the Dallas Museum of Art (2004), A Private Garden: The Jack and Elaine Folline Collection of the Works of Louis Comfort Tiffany (2001), reinstalled Museum’s American decorative arts holdings, including the creation of a dedicated gallery of 19th-century silver, and helped the Museum acquire a major work of English 18th-century silver, the Huntingdon Wine Cistern, a gift of the late Patricia Davis Beck.

Tucker holds an M.A. degree in Applied History/Museum Studies and a B.A. in History from the University of South Carolina.

Established in 1903, the Dallas Museum of Art is known for the strength of its European and American decorative arts collections, with special emphasis in 18th-century English silver, 19th- and 20th-century American silver and ceramics, and 20th-century design. In 2002, the Dallas Museum of Art acquired the Jewel Stern American Silver Collection, one of the world’s most distinguished collections of 20th-century American silver. In recent years, the Museum organized two decorative arts exhibitions that toured to select national venues. In 2000, the Museum’s American china and glass collection was the focus of From Tabletop to TV Tray: China and Glass in America, 1880–1980, and in 1994, drawing in part from its own rich holdings, the Museum mounted Silver in America, 1840–1940: A Century of Splendor.