Kenworth Moffett

Kenworth W. Moffett (born 1934 in East Orange, New Jersey – June 21, 2016) [1][2] was an American art curator, museum director and author. He was the first curator of twentieth-century art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and later the director of the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale (1987–1997), a position he left in order to attend to being the guiding light of the artist group he founded the "New New Painters".[3] From 1968 to 1979, prior to his becoming a museum curator and director, Moffett was a full professor of art history at Wellesley College. Moffett is the author of several books, including; volumes on Jules Olitski,[4] Fairfield Porter"A Realist Painter in the Age of Abstraction" (co-authored with John Ashberry among others to accompany the 1983 retrospective exhibition of Porter's work Moffett organized at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts of the American realist's work),[5][6] and Morris Louis.[7] He also penned catalogue essays and published Moffett's artletter 2.0.

Moffett studied art history at Columbia University, where he studied with Meyer Schapiro and Philip Pouncey, and graduated in 1960.[8][9] He then graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in 1968.[8]