Curator Chat

We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World

Heather Campbell Coyle, PhD
Curator of American Art
Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, DE 19806, www.delart.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I breezed through Boom! Art and Design in the 1940s at the Philadelphia Art Museum on my way to the Philadelphia Show a few weeks ago. I can’t wait to go back and spend some time with all the art, fashion and furnishings. The installation is dynamic, and the story is expansive. Having spent the past few years working on an exhibition of work from the 1920s and 1930s (Jazz Age Illustration), it’s fun to engage with what comes next.

What are you reading?
For work, I’m busy reading and, in some cases, rereading the essays in Imprinted: Illustrating Race, a catalog produced by the Norman Rockwell Museum for the exhibition of the same name. The show opens here in October, and it encompasses hundreds of years of American illustration and advertising material. It’s a lot to prepare for! For fun, I just finished Evie Woods’s The Lost Bookshop, which is just as utterly delightful as the reviews promise. Next up, a friend gave me John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I loved the Belle da Costa Greene show at the Morgan Library. This is my favorite kind of show—deeply researched and central to the institution that organized it. And it was full of stunning books and works of art. (Like many visitors, I had read The Personal Librarian, because I love historical fiction.) I was fascinated by the story of Greene identifying the “Spanish Forger,” a 19th-century forger of “medieval” paintings.

What are you researching at the moment?
The Winnebago illustrator and artist Angel De Cora, or Hinook-Mahiwi-Kalinaka. She was a student of Howard Pyle, whose work was the starting point of the Delaware Art Museum. Her book designs are outstanding, and her biography speaks to the experiences of Indigenous Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her original paintings are very rare, and one would be a dream acquisition for us. We do have vintage photographs of her time as a Pyle student, and some of her books. I’m collaborating with our librarian and local Indigenous creatives on a display about Angel De Cora for 2026.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I have a dream project to examine the role of wood in shaping modern American art. It’s not a furniture show (or at least not just a furniture show). I want to consider wood as subject, medium and matrix, as well as holder of cultural meaning. My checklist includes paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Horace Pippin and Andrew Wyeth; prints and drawings by Rockwell Kent; sculptures by William Zorach and Isamu Noguchi; and almost anything by Wharton Esherick. —