"I found teaching much later, quite unexpectedly, while working on my Ph.D.  I was delivering my first college course during a summer school session at Rutgers and I surprised myself at how much I loved being in the classroom.  In many ways, a classroom is more fluid than a museum, a space where ideas can be exchanged more quickly. There, I encourage my students to consider materials and ideas from the past in new ways, using primary texts alongside critical scholarship to recover lost meanings and revise current understandings about objects, a strategy I practice in my own research.  I am always learning from my students’ fresh perspectives.  Teaching has made me a better curator and curating has made me a better teacher.”

Tracy Fitzpatrick is a curator at the Neuberger Museum of Art and an assistant professor in art history in the undergraduate program and the Masters Degree Program in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at Purchase College, SUNY.  Combining curatorial work with curricular initiatives, she organizes exhibitions and teaches in the areas of modern art and museology.  Her exhibitions include Hannah Wilke: Gestures (2008),  Facing Abstraction: Refiguring the Body in the Twentieth Century (2006), Underground Art: A Centennial Celebration of the New York City Subway (2005), Another Dimension: Sculptors as Printmakers (1999), and Artful Advocacy: Cartoons from the Woman Suffrage Movement (1995).  Her book, Art and the Subway: New York Underground  was released in spring 2009.