David C. Ward was a curator for the award-winning exhibition, “Hide Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” His past exhibitions include, “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets,” “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln,” and “One Life: Walt Whitman: a kosmos.” At the museum, he has overseen permanent collection gallerys including the spaces devoted to the ante-bellum age (1820-60) as well as the (1945-1980) gallery in the ongoing exhibition, “Twentieth Century Americans.
Ward serves as one of the curators who develop the museum’s commended “Portraiture Now” series. He is co- editor of a book, Lines in Long Array, A Civil War Commemoration: Poems and Photographs, Past and Present (2013). For this publication, the Smithsonian commissioned poems from 12 contemporary poets. They produced deeply felt and well- wrought poems on subjects ranging from the history of the conflict to the experience of the common soldier.
Among Ward’s publications are Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Smithsonian Books, 2010), Charles Willson Peale, Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Univ. of California Press, 2004), “The Green Man: Walt Whitman and the Civil War,” Poetry Nation Review (April 2006), “The Real Thing: The Fiction of Realism,” The Sewanee Review (Spring 2006), and “’Thou bringest tally:’ Marsden Hartley’s Tribute to Hart Crane,” Poetry Nation Review (August 2004).
Ward has published more than 100 poems in Anglo-American literary magazines and has a collection called Internal Difference (2011). He has a book of poems, Call Waiting , published by Carcanet Press (Aug. 2014.)
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