Deborah M. Rothschild, curator of Making It New: The Art and Style
of Sara and Gerald Murphy

Biographical Information
Deborah Rothschild is Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She earned her Ph.D. and MA at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She also received a certificate in museum studies from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her dissertation, which examined Picasso's use of popular imagery in his designs for the ballet between 1917 and 1924, served as the basis of her book Picasso's ‘Parade’: From Street to Stage (London, Philip Wilson, 1991), which also accompanied an exhibition held at the Drawing Center in New York in April 1991. This publication was acclaimed in the New York Times and cited as one of the top five art books of the season by the Wall Street Journal.

A specialist in early 20th century and contemporary art, Dr. Rothschild is a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Vassar College. In 1982 she received the Theodore Rousseau Fellowship for research abroad from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has overseen more than 50 exhibitions, organizing shows of work by James Turrell, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Tony Oursler and many other living artists as well as numerous historical exhibitions. She has contributed articles and reviews to The Metropolitan Museum Journal, The Art Journal, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Arts Magazine, and Gastronomica. 

Dr. Rothschild co-organized the exhibition and catalogue, Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998), which toured nationally and internationally. The catalogue was translated into Spanish and Japanese and was honored with a number of awards including the I.D. Annual Design Review Award.

In the spring of 1999 Dr. Rothschild organized Introjection: Tony Oursler mid-career survey, which premiered at WCMA and the new Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). The exhibition traveled to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, and the Des Moines Art Center. It received a first place award from AICA, the 400-member International Association of Art Critics/USA.

In July 2002, Dr. Rothschild organized Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906–1913. The exhibition garnered record numbers of visitors for the museum and national and international press including coverage by Newsweek, the Associated Press, CNN and NPR. Foreign papers such as Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Jerusalem Post, and The Irish Times reviewed the show. Peter Schjeldahl writing in The New Yorker praised it as "a trenchant and scholarly exhibition…with well-written wall texts and judiciously selected art works and artifacts;” Holland Cotter in The New York Times called it “fascinating and well worth the effort;” and Tim Cahill in The Albany Times Union wrote the exhibition “is an act of total intellectual courage.”  The project received a second place award in the category of Best Thematic Exhibition from AICA/ New England.

Dr. Rothschild was a Fellow at the Francis C. Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College for the academic year 1999–2000. She served on the board of the Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College from 1998 to 2004. She is currently a member of the board of Images Cinema, Williamstown; the Contemporary Arts Center, North Adams; and is on the advisory board of Northern Berkshire Creative Arts. In 2002 she served on the Curators’ Forum Advisory Committee of the American Federation of Arts. 

Besides curating Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, Dr. Rothschild is also editor of the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.