Barbara Bloemink began her tenure as Curatorial Director of Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution in 2002. Describing Dr. Bloemink as a “curator of distinction with vast experience in museum management,” Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Warwick Thompson charged the curatorial director with leading the staff in creating an innovative exhibition schedule, and offering “an imaginative and challenging discourse between our historic and contemporary artifacts” as befitting the country’s National Design Museum.

As the former Director and Chief Curator of the Hudson River Museum, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, and, as Managing Director of the Guggenheim Hermitage and Guggenheim Las Vegas Museums, Bloemink has made numerous and diverse contributions to international art scholarship and museums. She has authored numerous books, including Design ≠ Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread; Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation; Michael Lucero Sculpture, 1976-1995; James Croak: 20 Years of Sculpture; and The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer; and has written more than 25 articles and essays for anthologies including Women in Dada, Design Life Now, and Decorative Excess and Women Artists in the Early Modernist Era. Bloemink has lectured widely, served on many international panels, and has organized more than eighty museum exhibitions, including, Yinka Shonibare Selects Works from the Permanent Collections; Re-Righting History: Contemporary African-American Art; The Egyptian Movement in American Decorative Arts; Constructing Reality: Contemporary Photography; and she co-organized the Florine Stettheimer Manhattan Fantastica exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bloemink’s academic background is considerable. She earned her doctorate at Yale, specializing in international 20th Century art and design, with minors in African-American and Latin American Art. Her Masters of Philosophy, also taken at Yale, focused upon 17th- through 19th- century American painting and decorative arts. Bloemink also completed a Master’s Degree at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, focusing on 17th- through 19th- century European art; and earned her bachelor of arts degree from Stanford University.

Barbara Bloemink lives in New York City.