Campbell Lecture Series to feature famed photography curator Anne Wilkes Tucker

Anne Wilkes Tucker, the curator emerita of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), will headline Rice University’s Campbell Lecture Series March 15-17.

This year’s program, titled “What We Do and Don’t Understand About Photographs,” will feature three lectures: “Looking, Not Seeing” (March 15), “Title or Caption? And Why Does That Matter?” (March 16) and “Teaching Empathy With Photographs” (March 17).

The lectures are free and open to the public and will begin at 6 each night in the Rice Media Center auditorium, 6100 Main St. Each lecture will highlight a particular aspect of Tucker’s perspective on the art and themes of photography and will be approximately 45 minutes, followed by a Q-and-A with the audience. A reception will follow the March 15 lecture.

Tucker, who was born in Baton Rouge, La., became the first curator of photography for MFAH in 1976 and founded the photography department that now has a collection of more than 30,000 photographs. She has curated over 40 exhibitions, including retrospectives for Robert Frank, Ray K. Metzker, Brassaï, George Krause, Louis Faurer and Richard Misrach. Tucker also curated the first museum shows for artists such as Joel Sternfeld and Catherine Wagner and the first exhibition in the U.S. by the Chinese photographer Chen Changfen. Most of these exhibitions were accompanied by a publication, some of which have been reprinted decades later. She has contributed essays to more than 100 monographs and catalogues of photographs and has published many articles and lectured throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America. Tucker became curator emerita at MFAH when she retired in 2015.

In 2001, in an issue devoted to “America’s Best,” Time Magazine honored her as America’s Best Curator. She was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Focus Award from the Griffin Photography Museum in 2006, and in 2011 she received an honorary doctorate degree from the College of Brockport, the State University of New York.

Tucker has undergraduate degrees from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and Rochester Institute of Technology and a graduate degree from the Visual Studies Workshop, a division of the State University of New York.

The Campbell Lecture Series was made possible by a $1 million contribution from Rice alumnus T.C. Campbell, who wanted to further the study of literature and the humanities with a 20-year annual series of public lectures. Through special arrangements with the University of Chicago Press, each lecture series is later published as a book. Previous Campbell lecturers include Robert Pinsky (2005), Ha Jin (2006), Alix Ohlin (2007), Stephen Greenblatt (2008), James Cuno (2009), Zadie Smith (2010), Stanley Fish (2012), Patrick Summers (2013), Robert Wilson (2014) and Michael Petry (2015).

Seating for the lectures is limited; RSVPs are requested to campbell.lecture@rice.edu. For more information, visit the Campbell Lecture Series website at http://campbell.rice.edu.