This lecture will take place in Fine Arts 015.
Anne Wilkes Tucker was born in 1945 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and studied at Randolph Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In 1967 she received a B.A. in Art History and then went on to receive an AAS in Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. In 1972, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Photographic History from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York that was part of the State University of New York, Buffalo. While at the VSW, she worked part time at the Eastman house and studied under Beaumont Newhall, the writer of the history of photography and photographer/curator Nathan Lyons. She then interned with John Szarkowski, the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1975 she moved to Houston and shortly after she helped to start the photography collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She was granted the title of Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photographs in 1984. In 2014, she announced her retirement from the Museum and finally stepped away in June of 2015.
Tucker is Curator Emerita of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she founded the photography department in 1976. The museum’s collection now comprises 30,000 photographs made on all seven continents.
Ms. Tucker has curated more than forty exhibitions, including retrospectives of the work of Brassaï, Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, George Krause, Ray K. Metzker, Chen Changfen, and Richard Misrach as well as important surveys included ones on the Czech Avant Garde, contemporary Korean Photography, a history of Japanese Photography and WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Photographs of armed conflict and its aftermath. Most of these exhibitions were accompanied by publications. She has also published many articles and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Getty Center. She received an Alumnae Achievement Award from Randolph Macon Woman’s College, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Museum and the Houston Fine Arts Fair and in 2001. Time Magazine listed her as America’s Best Curator in an issue devoted to America’s Best.