National Portrait Gallery Announces Charlotte Ickes as Museum’s First Curator of Time-Based Media Art

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has selected Charlotte Ickes as Curator of Time-Based Media and Special Projects. Ickes is the museum’s first curator dedicated to expanding the acquisition, management and exhibition of time-based media art. The museum’s time-based media collection includes works of video, film and other forms of durational media.

“Time-based media art challenges traditional notions of portraiture through its manipulation of space, time, and subject,” said Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “This new position will allow us to further diversify our collection by critically evaluating not just who, but what can be a portrait essential to telling the American story. It is a pleasure to welcome Charlotte to the National Portrait Gallery’s team of art historians."

Ickes earned her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also completed a certificate in cinema studies and wrote her dissertation on the aesthetics and politics of immersion in time-based media installations and film. She was also a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Ickes received her B.A. from Yale University. 

Ickes joins the National Portrait Gallery from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow. In that role, she co-curated the exhibitions “West by Midwest” and “Chicago Works: Assaf Evron.” Her curatorial résumé also includes the organization of exhibitions, film series and programs in Philadelphia (Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Slought) and in New York (at Anthology Film Archives and the Studio Museum in Harlem). 

Ickes has authored pieces for a variety of publications, such as American Art and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. She has edited and contributed to exhibition catalogues, including Anna Kunz: Color Cast (forthcoming), Ginny Casey & Jessi Reaves (2017) and Descent (2016). Ickes frequently serves as a commentator at museum industry and academic forums. In 2018, she co-organized and moderated an artist talk between Amanda Ross-Ho and Allen Ruppersberg at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She also participated in the panel “Night on Earth: Nocturnal Spaces across the Media Landscape” at the 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference.