Biography:

Franklin Kelly

Franklin Kelly is senior curator of American and British painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and a professor in the department of art history and archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received training in art history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (B.A., 1974), the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art (M.A., 1979), and the University of Delaware (Ph.D., 1985).

Kelly's concentration is on 19th- and early 20th-century American painting. His publications include Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (1988), Frederic Edwin Church (1989), Thomas Cole's Paintings of Eden (1995), and Nineteenth-Century American Paintings in the National Gallery of Art (1996), as well as articles and essays on a wide range of artists, including William Sidney Mount, Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Charles Sheeler. In 1995 he was the co-curator of the Winslow Homer exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, and co-author of the accompanying catalogue. More recently he was the curator for Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection, seen at the National Gallery of Art and at the Seattle Art Museum during 2000. He co-organized the exhibition Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2003 and will subsequently be seen at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and at the National Gallery in 2004.

Kelly has given numerous lectures at museums and universities in America and abroad. He is currently working on exhibitions devoted to the works of the great British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner and the early 20th-century American realist, George Bellows.

General Information

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon entering the East and West Buildings. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. For the safety of visitors and the works of art, nothing may be carried into the Gallery on a visitor's back. Any bag or other items that cannot be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left in the checkrooms. Items larger than 17 x 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms.

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