Alan Phipps Darr
Walter B. Ford II Family Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Alan Darr is a native of Illinois, and completed his Bachelor’s of Arts degree at Northwestern University before moving to New York City for graduate work. While completing his doctorate at the Institute of Fine Arts (New York University), Darr lived in England, France and Italy. As a Ford Foundation Fellow, he was affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has published and lectured in Europe and the United States and has taught art history at Northwestern University, New York University and Wayne State University in Detroit.

Since joining the DIA in 1978, Darr has organized exhibitions such as The Romantics to Rodin, The Art of Chivalry, The Precious Legacy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture in the Time of Donatello, and Woven Splendor: Five Centuries of European Tapestry in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and organized and co-authored the catalogues for most of these. Other publications Darr has organized and co-authored include The Dodge Collection of Eighteenth-Century French and English Art in The Detroit Institute of Arts and Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Detroit Institute of Arts. He is exhibition project director and co-author of the catalogue The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence. Darr has also written for Burlington Magazine and Apollo.

Darr received the bronze medal of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence. He was a post-doctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence, and was the Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. He has received postdoctoral awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Kress Foundation.

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