The city and the Friends of Overland Park Arts welcome Dr. Patricia McDonnell, director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, as the guest juror for the 2008 Art at the Center Juried Exhibition.
A 2003 graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute and the Management Certificate Program of the University of Washington School of Business, Patricia has doctorate and master's degrees in art history from Brown University and a bachelor's degree in German Studies from Mills College.
She was chief curator at Tacoma Art Museum from 2002 to 2006, and curator of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, from 1991 to the summer of 2002.
Patricia also has worked in various capacities at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Bell Art Gallery of Brown University and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.
From 1976 to 1983, Patricia helped found and administer the Getty Trust’s leadership program, originally the Museum Management Institute affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.
At the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Patricia was part of the planning, and in 1993, helped move the museum to its new building designed by internationally acclaimed architect Frank O. Gehry.
In 2003, at the Tacoma Art Museum, she was again part of the planning and move to a new museum building designed by eminent architect Antoine Predock. At both museums, she headed the exhibitions, touring shows, publications and collection development.
Patricia has published widely on American and European modern and contemporary art in such journals as Art Criticism, Art Journal, Arts Magazine and Archives for American Art Journal and as an invited author for such museums as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Wadsworth Atheneum.
She has curated exhibitions on a broad range of topics — from early abstraction in art to contemporary ceramics and recent photography.
In the range of her studies and curatorial projects, McDonnell focuses on the relationships between art and culture, emphasizing the larger context from which works of art develop.
Juror alumni include: William T. Wiley, Sondra Freckelton, Bo Bartlett, Rackstraw Downes, Neil Welliver, Preston Jackson, Mark English, Sangram Majumdar and Dean L. Mitchell.