Works on Paper

About the Juror

Marilyn Symmes is a New York City-based art curator with expertise in prints, drawings, and photographs. After starting her career at the Smith College Museum of Art, followed by the Detroit Institute of Arts, she was the curator in charge of graphic arts collections at the Toledo Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. She has organized many prints, drawings and photography exhibitions over the decades, and managed museum collections with works of art on paper from the Renaissance to contemporary American art.

Symmes has served as a juror for several regional, national and international exhibitions in the United States and abroad. She also has also been a grant reviewer for the Association of Print Scholars organization, as well as for the National Endowment for the Arts Indemnity advisory panel.

As a guest curator for the Brooklyn Historical Society, Symmes organized the 2017 exhibition Shifting Perspectives: Photographs of Brooklyn’s Waterfront. Her books include Impressions of New York, Prints from the New-York Historical Society (2005) and the monograph Dancing with the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints (2011); the book accompanied the Zimmerli Art Museum’s traveling exhibition), as well as other publications on prints, drawings, photographs and artist-illustrated books.

She contributed an essay about Dater’s portrait photographs to the book, Only Human/Judy Dater (2017).

Currently, as a consultant curator, she works for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, in addition to serving as a research cataloguer in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.