Sarah Kelly Oehler

Our Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Arts of the Americas, and vice president, Curatorial Strategy, Sarah joined the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Her current project is Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” (2024), which explores the artist’s urban subjects within the broader context of her work of the 1920s. Recent projects include the 2022 reimagination and reinstallation of the Arts of the Americas galleries and the acquisition and installation of the monumental Hartwell Memorial Window by Tiffany Studios. In 2018, Sarah curated the critically acclaimed Charles White: A Retrospective, the first major retrospective of this influential African American artist in several decades. Other exhibitions include Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945 (2018), Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon Returns to Chicago (2017), America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s (2016), Shatter Rupture Break: The Modern Series I (2015), and They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, 1910–1950 (2013). She has contributed to numerous other exhibitions and publications at the museum, including Whistler Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago (2020), Ivan Albright Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), and American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago from World War I to 1955 (2009). She received her PhD in American art from Columbia University and her BA in history from Yale University.