Elliot Bostwick Davis

Elliot Bostwick Davis (born February 28, 1962) is the John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and director of the Museum’s Art of the Americas Wing. Under her leadership, a new and more inclusive way of telling the story of art in the Americas was realized when the Art of the America’s Wing opened on November 5, 2010.

The Wing, which received 13,500 visitors on its opening day, and over 1.7 million visitors in its first year, drew favorable reviews for its innovative, global paradigm. Holland Cotter, writing in the New York Times, said of the new installation dedicated to the concept of American art in an Americas context, "If any museum could pull off such a summit meeting, this one could. And under the leadership of Elliot Bostwick Davis, chairman of the Art of the Americas department, it has." Kathleen Foster, director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said "I don't think there is another museum that united the hemisphere in this fashion."

Since the opening, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, have augmented their permanent installations to feature greater representations of Native American Art, Mexican Art, and Ancient American Art.

In an interview published in the Boston Globe at the time of the opening, Davis says her career stemmed from a “lucky break” of being born into a family whose involvement with art stretches back five generations. Members of that family include a significant number of women, among them Electra Havemeyer Webb, Davis’ great-grandmother, who founded the Shelburne Museum in Vermont; Aileen Osborn Webb, founder of the American Craft Museum in New York City; Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Studio and subsequently the Whitney Museum of American Art; and her mother, Lillian Bostwick Davis, an artist and printmaker.

Malcolm Rogers director of the MFA from 1994 to 2015, who initially conceived of the Master Site Plan that transformed the institution, said of Davis at the time of the opening of the Wing, “Museums are in the blood of her family. She has real vision, and also, I would say, a sense almost of moral responsibility to tell the tale of American art.”

Art of the Americas Wing

Rogers’ original designation of the Art of the Americas in 1999, along with his commitment to building the new Wing, proved the successful lure that brought Davis, who had been working the Metropolitan Museum as an assistant curator, to the MFA in 2001. In her position as the John Moors Cabot Chair and the Art of the Americas department head, Davis has overseen a collection of over 15,000 paintings, sculpture and decorative arts produced throughout the Americas, from 900 BCE through the last third of the twentieth century, a collection second only to that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As part of her vision to engage a broader audience, Davis included in the Wing artists previously under-represented at the MFA, building a major collection of art by African Americans as well as attracting and assembling collections by women artists, Latin American, Native American, folk and outsider artists. She recently spearheaded significant acquisitions such as Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia), 1928, the first painting by Frida Kahlo to enter any New England public collection. Her goal, she said, was to display “a much broader spectrum and a much wider range of artists,” with the results prompting prominent critic Ada Luisa Huxtable to write in the Wall Street Journal “The Art in Americas Wing has resulted in vast expansion of the conventional definition of American art.”

Influences and Family Heritage

Davis has traced influences of her lifelong passion for art to the fact that a significant number of her family members – largely female - were artists, promoters of the arts, and prominent patrons.

Her mother, Lillian Bostwick Davis, who died when Davis was four, was an artist and printmaker, and served as a member of the governing board of the Art Students League in New York City, where Davis herself studied life drawing and printmaking starting as a teenager.

Her grandmother, Electra Webb Bostwick (1910-1982) studied with Alexander Archipenko and showed professionally in New York City at Milch Galleries and Hirschl and Adler Galleries, Inc. A collector of European and American art, she was, along with her husband, Dunbar W. Bostwick, a major donor to numerous institutions, foremost among them, the Shelburne Museum.

Her great grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb (1885-1960), a pioneering collector of American folk art, founded the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, which today houses over 150,000 works of folk art, decorative arts, and European and American paintings.

Her great-great grandmother, Louisine Waldron Havemeyer (1855-1929) brought the first paintings by Claude Monet and Edgar Degas to the United States and following her marriage to Henry Osborne Havemeyer, commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany and Samuel Colman to design her family’s NYC home on East 66th Street. Although the house was destroyed by fire, saved elements are now in the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Other important female philanthropists with whom Davis shares family connections are Aileen Osborn Webb, founder of the American Craft Museum in NYC, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Studio and subsequently, the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In an interview, Davis has noted that when Louisine Havemeyer died, she left some notes for her son and daughters. “Children,’’ she wrote, “Remember how blessed you are, and, if opportunity ever offers, equalize the sum of human happiness, and spread the sunshine you have inherited.’’

Speaker, Lecturer

July 12, 2017, Keynote Speaker, Andrew Wyeth Centennial Celebration, “Heaven is Under our Feet, as Well as Over our Heads: Henry David Thoreau and the Wyeth Family of Artists,” Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine.

2015, COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION, Panelist, Remaking the American Gallery, “A Work in Progress: The Art of the Americas Wing”

IDEAS, Boston, October 20, 2011, Selected as one of 16 leading innovators to present at the University of Massachusetts with host Tom Ashbrook of WBUR’s “On Point,” The Art of the Americas Wing.

Board Service

ASSOCIATION OF ART MUSEUM CURATORS (AAMC), Trustee, 2006-2009; 2017 to present.

MASS Humanities: 2011 to present

GROTON SCHOOL, Groton, MA; 1993-1999; 2000-2007

SHELBURNE MUSEUM, Shelburne, VT, 1993-2002

NEW YORK ACADEMY OF ART, 1993-2001

Professional Honors and Awards

2015 BOSTON SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTS, Art of the Americas Wing, Harleston Parker Award for the single most beautiful building erected in the Boston Metropolitan area in the past decade.

2011 ASSOCIATION OF ART MUSEUM CURATORS, Annual Exhibition Prize Honoring the Outstanding Permanent Collection Installation of 2010, The Art of the Americas Wing.

2000 "The Currency of Culture: Prints in New York City," in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, Exh.cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York., 2000,pp. 186–225. Selected as one of the 25 most important books in the year 2000, New York Public Library.

Selected Publications

2015: George Washington and The Passage of the Delaware, Spotlight Series, MFA, Publications. 2014 Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, December 2014, co-author, and curatorial editor. Jamie Wyeth, Exh. cat., Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2014. “A Place in the World of Art: Cassatt, Degas, and American Collectors,” Co-author with Erica E. Hirshler, in Kimberly Jones, et al., Degas/Cassatt, Exh. cat., Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2014, finalist for the Alfred Barr, Jr. Award, College Art Association.

2010 A New World Imagined: Art of the Americas, Editor and co-author. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010. “The Art of the Americas Wing, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” American Art. Smithsonian American Art Museum (Summer 2010), Vol. 24, Number 2, 9-11.

Personal life

Davis was married to John Sebastian Paolella in 1988. They have two children, William and James.