Jane Panetta Named as The Met’s Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the appointment of Jane Panetta as the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Panetta joins The Met from the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she is currently the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator and Director of the Collection.
The Museum further announced that Destinee Filmore will join The Met as Assistant Curator. Filmore is currently a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Williams College Museum of Art.
Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, said: “It is my great pleasure to announce these new appointments. This is an incredibly active phase for Modern and Contemporary art at The Met, as we are planning and implementing the renovation of the Oscar L. and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing. I’m delighted that Jane Panetta and Destinee Filmore will be joining the Museum as we are undertaking this important work.”
David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, remarked: “I’m beyond excited that Jane and Destinee will be joining The Met at such a crucial—and exciting—time for modern and contemporary art at the museum. Jane is a rigorous and beloved curator, equally adept at collaborating with living artists as she is framing historical collections for their past and contemporary resonances. Destinee is a rising star in our field, a thoughtful young scholar who thinks deeply about the complexity of art production in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Jane and Destinee will be joining an extremely talented team of curators already in place in the department. I look forward to working together, especially on the Tang Wing, to draw out the complementary and novel thinking that is only possible when brilliant individuals work collaboratively.”
Panetta commented: “I am thrilled to be joining The Met, notably at this historic moment as the museum looks ahead to the forthcoming Tang Wing and what’s sure to be a reimagining of the Modern and Contemporary galleries and collection. Doing this work within the broader context of the Met’s collection feels particularly resonant to me.”
Jane Panetta
Jane Panetta is a curator and scholar with special interests in American and European modern and contemporary art. She joined the Whitney in 2013 and, most recently, led the collection team as the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator and Director of the Collection, overseeing acquisitions and collection displays, and served as the co-director overseeing analysis and planning for the future of the collection. During her tenure at the Whitney, Panetta facilitated a number of critical historical acquisitions including key works by Carmen Herrera, Norman Lewis, Juanita McNeely and Jack Whitten. Panetta also served on the Whitney Museum’s Emerging Artists Working Group (which she co-led from 2018-2020) and has also been instrumental in building programming of emerging artists and related works for the collection.
Panetta has curated a wide range of projects at the Whitney beginning with her work on the curatorial team for America Is Hard to See (2015), the Museum’s inaugural presentation of the collection in its downtown location and was also the co-curator of the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additionally, Panetta has curated solo and groups show at the Whitney including Mirror Cells (2016), Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980s (2017) and organized solo presentations of the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015), Willa Nasatir (2017), Juan Antonio Olivares (2018), Jill Mulleady (2020), Jennifer Packer (2021) and Rose B. Simpson (2023).
Prior to joining the Whitney, Panetta worked at The Museum of Modern Art for nearly a decade where she worked on a range of large-scale monographic projects as part of the Department of Painting and Sculpture including Edvard Munch: the Modern Life of the Soul (2006), Richard Serra: Forty Years (2007), and James Ensor (2009). Panetta has lectured, taught and written widely on contemporary art and sculpture, in particular, including work with Art in America, Modern Painters, Dia Beacon, Storm King Art Center, Yale University School of Art and Parsons/The New School. Panetta holds a B.A. in History from Haverford College and an M.A. in Art History from Hunter College. Panetta is also member of Madison Square Park’s Public Art Consortium.
Destinee Filmore
Destinee Filmore is a curator, art historian, and writer dedicated to telling a more complex history of American art that centers women and historically marginalized makers. She has published and presented research on an assortment of artists and topics, including the work of Alvin D. Loving, Nellie Mae Rowe, and Mildred Thompson; and she continues to explore research topics ranging from vernacular African American artistic traditions, the reception history of identity-based exhibitions, and the visual and material culture of Afro-Cosmopolitanism in the early 20th century. As a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Williams College Museum of Art, she led efforts to define and expand the museum’s ethical collecting practices, and curated exhibitions and permanent collection rotations. Additionally, Filmore leads a team of technologists, designers, and researchers as the Project Director of On This Land, a Ford Foundation-funded initiative dedicated to using technology and archival research to transform the landscape of public remembrance in Atlanta. Filmore holds a B.A. in Art History from Spelman College and an M.A. from the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College.
About the Tang Wing
The Met announced plans to fully reimagine its current modern and contemporary galleries in November 2021. Led by architect Frida Escobedo, the project will create 80,000 square feet of galleries and public space. The Met has been seeking to revamp its Modern Wing for more than a decade. The reimagination of the wing will enable the Museum to approach 20th- and 21st-century art from a global, encyclopedic, playful, and surprising perspective. This bold new vision will result in a building that respects and connects with the Museum’s archipelago of architectural styles as well as its spatial organization and infrastructure. Through these new spaces, the curatorial approach to the wing will rethink chronology by suggesting points of both interconnection and rupture.
About The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day—who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met displays tens of thousands of objects covering 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.
