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Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D.

Curator of Prints and Drawings

she/her/hers

Mary Weaver Chapin joined the Portland Art Museum in 2012. She oversees a large and varied collection of more than 20,000 prints, posters, and artists’ books that date from the fifteenth century to the present. She is responsible for the care, collection, research, and exhibition of prints, and oversees the Haber Study Center in the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts. She is the founder of the Portland Fine Print Fair, and serves as the president of the national professional organization Print Council of America. 

Chapin has curated numerous exhibitions at the Museum including the loan shows Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889-1900 in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art (2021), an exhibition and catalogue that explores the work of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Félix Vallotton; Paris 1900: City of Entertainment with Paris Musées, Museums of the City of Paris (2019); and David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress, presented in partnership with the Hockney Foundation and the Portland Opera (2015), among others. In addition, she keeps a busy schedule curating thematic exhibitions that highlight the riches of the permanent collection from the Renaissance to the present. Recent highlights include The Art of Reading: American Publishing Posters of the 1890s (2019-2020);  Kingdom Animalia: Animals in Print from Durer to Picasso (2017-2018); and Corita Kent: Spiritual Pop (2016); and This Is War! Graphic Arts of the Great War (2014).

A specialist in nineteenth-century French art, Chapin is a noted expert on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; she was the co-curator of the exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. which won the Association of Art Museum Curators Annual Prize for Best Museum exhibition in 2005. In 2012, she curated the exhibition Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries, mounted at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

Chapin is a graduate of Wellesley College and earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She writes and lectures widely on the graphic arts from the eighteenth-century to the present, and is the author of the catalogue raisonné of the graphic work of contemporary artist Warrington Colescott.

Mary Weaver Chapin