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David W. Penney

Associate Director of Museum Scholarship, National Museum of the American Indian

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Biography

David has been involved in GRASAC since its inception in 2005. He has participated in a number of GRASAC research trips and conferences, and supervised the entry of the collections from the Detroit Institute of Arts into the GRASAC database. David has been a member of GRASAC’s Steering Committee, offering us much valued institutional advice, since 2015.

David was appointed as the first Associate Director of the newly organized Museum Scholarship Group at NMAI in 2011 after a long career at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which included being Chief Curator and then Vice President of Exhibitions and Collections Strategies. His exhibitions of note include “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist,” with co-curator Kathleen Ash-Milby, “Indigenous Beauty: American Indian Art from the Diker Collection” for the American Federation of Arts, “Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes” a collaboration with co-curator Gerald McMaster and the Art Gallery of Ontario, “The American Indian: Art and Culture Between Myth and Reality” for the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and “Art of the American Indian Frontier: The Chandler Pohrt Collection” and “Ancient Art of the American Woodland Indians” for the National Gallery of Art. His publications include the exhibition catalogue for Before and After the Horizon, “Native American Art: Pre-contact,” for the Oxford Bibliographies for Art History, and Native North American Art.

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Recent Posts

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  • To Honour and Respect receives Michael M Ames Award for Innovation in Museum Anthropology
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