Rachel McGarry is the Elizabeth MacMillan Chair and Curator of European Art. She oversees Mia’s internationally acclaimed collection of European paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, books, and decorative arts, comprising more than 36,000 works dating from antiquity to 1969. Since joining Mia in 2006, McGarry has organized numerous exhibitions.
In 2022, she co-curated “Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi” in partnership with the Uffizi Galleries, one of the most comprehensive shows on Botticelli ever staged in the United States. Other major projects include “Envisioning Evil: ‘The Nazi Drawings’ by Mauricio Lasansky” (2021–22), examining Lasansky’s 1960s series of monumental drawings confronting the Holocaust. The accompanying catalogue considered the shifting understanding of the Holocaust in postwar America and the legacy of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Her exhibition “Marks of Genius: 100 Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts” opened at Mia in 2014 and toured to three other venues. McGarry oversaw the important publication Master Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Art that accompanied the show.
McGarry earned an MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. Her dissertation examined the early career of Guido Reni and his activities in Bologna and Rome. Before coming to Mia, she worked at Christie’s in New York and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an exhibition assistant in Drawings and Prints and research assistant in European Paintings.