About the Participants
Matilda McQuaid is Deputy Curatorial Director and Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. McQuaid oversees one of the premier textile collections in the world which includes more than 26,000 textiles produced over 2,000 years. She has organized nationally and internationally acclaimed architecture and design exhibitions with accompanying publications including Josef + Anni Albers: Designs for Living (2004), Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance (2005), Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay (2011), Tools: Extending Our Reach (2014) and Scraps: Fashion, Textiles, and Creative Reuse (2016). Between 2014 and 2016, she led a major collection digitization project at the Museum with more than 200,000 objects photographed and available online. Formerly at the Museum of Modern Art, New York for fifteen years, McQuaid curated over thirty exhibitions; she is also an accomplished author and editor on art, architecture and design, with many books, exhibition catalogues and articles to her credit.
Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames and Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN America award for biography. A former Senior Editor of Art in America, where she remains a Contributing Editor, she has also written for The New York Times, Artforum and the Village Voice. Princenthal is the author of Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010) and a co-author of two recent books on women artists. Her essays have appeared in monographs on Alfredo Jaar, Robert Mangold, Shirin Neshat and Doris Salcedo among many others. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.), Hunter College (M.A.) and the Whitney Independent Study program, Princenthal has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; and Yale University, and is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts.
Patterson Sims has worked in the arts since 1969, and was the Director of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey from 2001-2009. His distinguished career as a museum professional includes serving as Deputy Director for Education and Research Support at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. Prior to this, he was Associate Director for Art and Exhibitions and Curator of Modern Art at the Seattle Art Museum between 1987 and 1996, and was the first curator designated to oversee the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he worked from 1976 to 1987. He began his career as Assistant Director of O.K. Harris Works of Art, in the then newly-developing arts district of Soho, in 1969. Sims has organized one-artist exhibitions of numerous artists including Ellsworth Kelly, John Storrs, Jan Matulka, Viola Frey, Fred Wilson, Claire Zeisler, Willie Cole, and Hedda Sterne. He was a co-curator of four Whitney Biennial exhibitions. Sims is the former President and current Co-chair of the Board of Trustees of Independent Curators International (ICI).
