Curatorial Consultant, Fitzgerald Legacy
A specialist in American Art and the history of photography, Danly holds PhD and MA degrees from Brown University, where she wrote a dissertation on “The Landscape Photographs of Alexander Gardner and A.J. Russell.” As curator of American art, she has worked at the Portland Museum of Art (2002-2012, retired), Mead Art Museum (1993-2000), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1988-93), and the Huntington Library and Art Gallery (1984-87). Among her numerous publications are books on the photographs of Edward Weston and Thomas Eakins, and Georgia O’Keeffe and the Photograph. At the Portland Museum of Art, she curated numerous exhibitions devoted to the art of Maine, including three Biennial exhibitions, a series of shows dealing with historical and contemporary photography in Maine, and several exhibitions of graphics from the PMA’s permanent collection
Among her exhibitions and catalogs over the past 30 years are: Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur (1997) and Language as Object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art (1997) for the Mead Art Museum. In conjunction with American Federation of Art, she presented three traveling exhibitions drawn from the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy: Facing the Past (1992), Telling Tales (1991), and Light, Air, and Color (1990). In 1987 she co-curated an exhibition of Edward Weston’s photographs with the Getty Museum. Weston’s “Leaves of Grass” project was also the focus of her contribution to Edward Weston: A Legacy (Merrill Press, 2003). Other writing projects include Changing Prospects: The View from Mount Holyoke (2002) and an essay in Casa Mañana: The Morrow Collection of Mexican Popular Culture, University of New Mexico Press (2002), a book that she also edited. Her publication, Eakins and the Photograph, received the Wittenborn Memorial Award from the ARLIS in 1994. Her last major publication for the Portland Museum of Art, Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland, 1900-1940 (2011), received awards from the Boston art critics and the New England Society of New York.
Over the past decade, Ms. Danly has written catalogue essays and lectured for exhibitions about Monhegan Island artists: Side by Side on Monhegan, The Henri Circle and the American Impressionists (2004), Lynn Drexler, Painter, (2008), and The Famous and the Forgotten, Monhegan 1914 (2014). In 2014 she organized the Quadricentennial exhibition of contemporary artists working on the island. In collaboration with Lucia Taylor Miller, she recently produced a book, Warner Taylor, Photographing Monhegan, (1912-1958). Ms. Danly is currently president of the board for the Monhegan Artists’s Residency Program.