Celebrate the BMA's 110th anniversary at the spectacular BMA Ball and After Party on Saturday, November 23, 2024.
null Oliver  Shell
Photo by Christopher Myers

Oliver Shell

Curator of European Painting and Sculpture

Curatorial

Dr. Oliver Shell received a PhD in art history at the University of Pennsylvania. He came to BMA in 2003 as the Samuel H. Kress Curatorial Fellow, then as a National Gallery of Art: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Fellow, researching 19th- and early 20th-century French bronze production and, specifically, the casting practice of Henri Matisse. This work led to the 2007 BMA exhibition Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, presented at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Since 2007, as Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, Oliver has organized exhibitions including: The Persistent Figure in Modern Sculpture, 2006/2007; Rodin: Expression and Influence, 2007; A Circus Family: Picasso to Léger, 2009; Advancing Abstraction in Modern Sculpture, 2010/2011; and German Expressionism: A Revolutionary Spirit, 2014. Curator of European Painting and Sculpture since 2019, his recent exhibitions include: Monsters and Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s, which ran at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville.