Dr. Greenwold will explore the multiple lives of James McNeill Whistler’s masterpiece of art and design, the Peacock Room. Originally created as a dining room for the London, England mansion of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, upon Leyland’s death in 1892, it was purchased in its entirety by Charles Lang Freer. Freer then reinstalled it in his Detroit home, where it was used to display his own diverse collection of Asian ceramics. Following Freer’s death in 1919, the entire room traveled again, this time from Detroit to Washington, DC, where it has been on permanent display since the opening of the Freer Gallery in 1923 (now the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art). Following a major restoration in 2022, the Peacock Room endures as a dynamic space where changing exhibitions draw attention to different aspects of its history, including reinterpretations by contemporary artists and curators.

Dr. Greenwold is the Lunder Curator of American Design at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, where she oversees the Museum’s premier collections of work by James McNeill Whistler and American art of the Gilded Age. Prior to arriving at the Smithsonian, Dr. Greenwold served as Curator of American Art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine from 2014 to 2021. There she oversaw the museum’s collection of over 11,000 American paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts. Her recent exhibitions include Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington (2020) and In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-69 (2018). Greenwold received her B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.