Heather Lemonedes Brown

Heather Lemonedes Brown was appointed curator of modern European art at the CMA in 2024. Between 2016 and 2023, she served as the Virginia N. and Randall J. Barbato Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the CMA when she oversaw the Collections Division which includes the curatorial, conservation, collections management, and performing arts departments along with the Ingalls Library and Museum Archives. She joined the curatorial staff at CMA in 2002 and was named curator of drawings in 2010. She serves as adjunct professor in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University. 

Brown has curated and cocurated numerous exhibitions with scholarly catalogues at the CMA. Most recently she curated Impressionism to Modernism: The Keithley Collection and edited the associated publication. Brown’s other exhibitions include Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889–1900, co-organized with the Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2021). The exhibition catalogue for Private Lives was short-listed for the Alice Award, was a cowinner of the 2022 Midwest Art History Association prize, and was awarded “Best in Show” by the Ohio Museums Association. Additional exhibitions with publications include British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art (2013); Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889 (2009), co-organized with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; and Monet in Normandy (2007), co-organized with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Brown has curated various exhibitions for the prints and drawings galleries at the CMA, including Pure Color: Pastels from the Cleveland Museum of Art (2016–17); Imagining the Garden (2015–16); Themes and Variations: Musical Drawings and Prints (2015); and Mary Cassatt and the Feminine Ideal in 19th-Century Paris (2012). She has published and lectured widely on 19th-century European art.

Brown received a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York; a master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; and a bachelor’s degree in art history from Vassar College.

Previously, she had been employed in the Prints and Drawings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and was a specialist in the Print Department at Christie’s, New York.

Contact the Curator at: ModernEuropeanPainting@clevelandart.org