William L. Coleman
Wyeth Foundation Curator of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection and Director of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Study Center
Brandywine River Museum of Art
We partnered with the Brandywine River Museum of Art on the search for a Wyeth Foundation Curator of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection and Director of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Study Center. The Brandywine River Museum of Art is a museum of regional and American art located on U.S. Route 1 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania on the banks of the Brandywine Creek.
Funded by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, this role emerged from an innovative collections-sharing partnership between the Brandywine, the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Wyeth Foundation—which was announced in spring 2022.
Coleman is an experienced curator, art historian and teacher.
In this role, he is responsible for stewarding the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection, located jointly at the Brandywine in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine—the two geographic regions where Andrew Wyeth lived and painted. Managed by Coleman under the auspices of the Brandywine, the collection is comprised of nearly 7,000 works from across Wyeth’s seven decades as a working artist, including rarely seen paintings, watercolors, sketches and sketchbooks.
Coleman joined the Brandywine from The Olana Partnership, Hudson, NY, where he served as the Director of Collections & Exhibitions. There, Coleman oversaw the organization’s 90,000-item collection/archive, as well as the traveling loan exhibitions program of the artist Frederic Edwin Church’s 250-acre estate—a New York State Historic Site and National Historic Landmark.
Coleman has particular expertise in nineteenth-century American landscape painting and has published a variety of related scholarship on the subject, as well as on architecture and music.
Prior to The Olana Partnership, Coleman was Associate Curator of American Art at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey, where he was responsible for the institution’s world-class collection of nineteenth-century paintings, as well as major exhibitions and publications.
He has been awarded fellowships with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.
Coleman holds a BA in History of Art from Haverford College. He received his Master of Studies in Musicology from the University of Oxford, England and an MA in history of art from Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. He earned his PhD in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.