Peter Galassi


Peter Galassi is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art.

Education

Galassi holds a B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University.

Life and work

Galassi was Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1991 to 2011. He started his career at MoMA as a Curatorial Intern, Associate Curator, and Curator working with photography curator John Szarkowski.
After first organizing a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit in 1987 as a photography curator at MoMA, he organized a larger Cartier-Bresson exhibit as chief curator of MoMA in 2010. He was replaced as chief curator of photography at MoMA in December 2012 by Quentin Bajac, after retiring in 2011.
He curated a large Barcelona exhibit of Gyula Halász in 2018, with the British Journal of Photography saying "exhibition could be considered to be Galassi’s biggest curatorial endeavour so far since he retired from MoMA."
With "PROOF" in February 2020, he was guest curator on a collection of works from the collection of Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz. The exhibit was published in the book PROOF: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet from the Collection of Mark Schwartz + Bettina Katz in 2020, written by Galassi.

Exhibitions curated by Galassi

At Museum of Modern Art, New York

Books and Exhibition Catalogues