Rep Gerry Ward

Gerald W.R. Ward is the consulting curator of the Portsmouth Historical Society, where he serves in addition as the editor of the Portsmouth Marine Society Press. He is also the Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture Emeritus at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he teaches early American art.

Ward is a 1971 graduate of Harvard College and has his Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University. He joined the Museum of Fine Arts in 1992, and from 1999 to 2012 he served as the Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, with responsibility for a collection of about 13,000 objects. For several years, he was focused on plans for the new Art of the Americas Wing, which opened in November 2010, containing some fifty-three galleries and period rooms. Among his publications are Silver in American Life (co-editor with Barbara McLean Ward, 1979), American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (1988), American Folk (co-author, 2001), The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940-1990 (co-author, 2003), MFA Highlights: American Decorative Arts and Sculpture (co-author, 2006), Shy Boy, She Devil and Isis, The Art of Conceptual Craft: Selections from the Wornick Collection (co-author, 2007), Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000 (co-editor and co-author, 2008), Boston Furniture, 1700-1900 (co-editor and contributor, 2016), Four Centuries of Furniture in Portsmouth (2017), New Hampshire Folk Art: For the People, By the People (2019), Family Treasures: 175 Years of Collecting Art and Furniture at the New England Historic Genealogical Society (2020), and about seventy-eight articles and sixty-eight book reviews. Gerry has been married since 1972 to Barbara McLean Ward, director-curator of the Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden in Portsmouth and a noted scholar of American silver and material culture. The Wards have lived in Portsmouth since 1988.