May 2009
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) has appointed Eike D. Schmidt as the new James Ford Bell Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture and head of the Department of Decorative Arts, Textiles & Sculpture.
In this capacity Schmidt will lead one of the MIA’s largest and most diverse curatorial departments, with more than 18,000 works in various mediums from America and Europe, from the Middle Ages to the present.
Schmidt comes to the museum from Sotheby’s, London, where he has worked as the Director of the European Sculpture and Works of Art Department. Prior to this post, he was with the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, as Associate Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Schmidt also worked at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., as a research associate and a research curator in the Department of Sculpture, and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy. He will assume his position with the MIA later in the year.
A native of Germany, Schmidt received his Ph.D. from Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg. His dissertation was titled The Medici’s Collection of Ivory Sculptures in the 16th and 17th Centuries. He received a fellowship from the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, Italy (1994-95), and was an Erasmus Fellow at the Università degli studi, Bologna, from 1991- 92. In 1997 he was awarded the Premio Nicoletta Quinto by the Foundation Galileo Galilei, in Pisa, for the best contribution to the humanities in Italy by an author younger than 30. Fluent in English, German, and Italian, he has published in several languages and has lectured extensively throughout Europe and the U.S.
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