Member Conversation: New Galleries for European Design

Ellenor Alcorn is chair and Eloise W. Martin Curator of Applied Arts of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago, a position she assumed in September 2018. 

Before joining the Art Institute, Ellenor was a curator in European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she served as lead curator for the renovation of the British Galleries and had ongoing responsibility for the collections of British and French silver (including gold boxes) as well as base metalwork. Her exhibitions at the Met include Victorian Electrotypes: Old Treasures, New Technology and British Silver: The Wealth of a Nation. Ellenor began her career at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has also worked independently, serving as consulting curator for the Gans Collection at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among other curatorial and research endeavors.

She holds a BA from Bard College and an MA in medieval studies from the University of York.

Christopher (Kit) Maxwell is the Art Institute’s Samuel and M. Patricia Grober Curator, in the department of Applied Arts of Europe. Before joining the museum in 2022, he was at the Corning Museum of Glass, where, as curator of early modern glass, he was responsible for collections ranging in date from about 1250 to 1820. Before joining the Corning Museum, Kit worked in several different capacities at the Royal Collection Trust, and from 2005 to 2010 he held the position of assistant curator in the ceramics and glass section at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he participated in the reinstallation of the ceramics galleries.

Kit received his BA in history of art from the University of Cambridge, his MA in decorative arts from Birkbeck College, University of London, and his PhD from the University of Glasgow with a dissertation on the dispersal of the Hamilton Palace collection. His recent postdoctoral work includes an MPhil on Nazi-era provenance from the University of Glasgow and an MRes in Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick with a focus on the material culture of the colonized Caribbean during the 18th century.

Jonathan Tavares is the Amy and Paul Carbone Curator in Applied Arts of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an early modern decorative arts, arms, and armor scholar with a PhD from the Bard Graduate Center. Jonathan is responsible for curating the arms and armor galleries, part of the Deering Family Galleries of Medieval and Renaissance Art, which opened in 2017. His purview includes medieval to Baroque applied arts, and he has published numerous articles on 16th-century arms and armor and its manufacture and connection to print culture, most recently in the journal West 86th with “Bloomery Iron, Steel, and the Interdisciplinary Search for an Early Modern Armor Industry.”