Keely Orgeman is a curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery. She began pursuing her chosen career as an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she worked as a curatorial assistant at the university-affiliated art gallery Tandem Press. During her graduate studies in art history at Boston University, she curated the exhibition Atomic Afterimage: Cold War Imagery in Contemporary Art (2008), which related to her dissertation on artists’ representations of radioactivity. Since arriving at Yale in 2008, she has held several positions at the museum, including curatorial fellow (2008–2011), assistant curator (2011–2016), and associate curator (2016–present), and organized the traveling exhibition Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light (2017) for YUAG and for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C. Her new project focuses on a portrait miniature depicting a woman of color from the early nineteenth century. Keely would happily discuss careers in the museum field or talk about art more generally with anyone who is interested. Please contact her via email.
