Katy Rothkopf
The Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Director of the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture
Curatorial
Katy Rothkopf (she/her) received her MA in art history from Williams College, and then spent two years as a Research Assistant in the Department of European Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In 1993, she moved to The Phillips Collection where she was Assistant Curator until her promotion to Associate Curator six years later. In 2000, she became the Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and in 2008 was promoted to Senior Curator and Department Head of European Painting and Sculpture. In 2020, Katy became The Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Director of the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies and Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture. In her 23 years at the BMA, she led the reinstallation of the Cone Collection in 2001; organized the BMA’s presentation of Art of the Ballets Russes in 2003 and Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames in 2005; and curated Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape in 2007. She was the co-curator of Cézanne and American Modernism in 2010, the first exhibition to explore the influence of Paul Cézanne’s paintings and watercolors on American artists in the early years of the 20th century. She was also the co-curator of Matisse/Diebenkorn in 2016, the first large-scale show to examine the influence of Henri Matisse on the work of American artist Richard Diebenkorn, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2021, Katy co-organized a show focused on the still-life paintings of Cubist painter Juan Gris, as well as an exhibition examining the close friendship between Baltimore collector Etta Cone and artist Henri Matisse.
Since the opening of the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies in December 2021, Katy has curated several exhibitions in the Jay McKean Fisher Gallery and will be installing Etched in Memory: Matisse’s Early Portraits later this year.