Catherine Whitney is a member of the Vilcek Foundation Board of Directors and the director of curatorial affairs for the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA). Whitney specializes in American art history and modernism, interpretation, audience engagement, and building exhibitions and arts education programs. Her integrative and community-based approach to arts programming and museum initiatives has established her as a vital part of arts and cultural communities across the United States, as her career has taken her from Washington, to Santa Fe, to Tulsa, and to Honolulu. 

Whitney joined the Board of Directors in August 2024 following nearly two decades of work and partnership as an advisor and collaborator of the Vilcek Foundation on exhibitions and arts initiatives. Whitney is an expert in the development of institutional and private collections, and attends to every work of art with the utmost of respect for the artist and for the context in which each work was created. 

After receiving her bachelor’s in art history and visual art at Bowdoin College, Whitney started her career at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), working as the assistant to the head of conservation and, later, as assistant to the director of teacher and school programs. It was in this latter role, and subsequent graduate internships in the curatorial and education fields at the NGA and Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, that she first found her passion for museum education, museum interpretation, and audience engagement. 

Whitney subsequently earned her Master’s degree in Art History at the University of Maryland, and was appointed director of 20th century American art for Gerald Peters Gallery, where she first met Rick Kinsel and the Vilceks. The foundation forged a meaningful partnership with Whitney in this role, as the Vilceks and the foundation were beginning to build their collections in American Modernist art.

The curatorial excellence Whitney demonstrated in her role with Gerald Peters led to Whitney’s appointment as chief curator and curator of American art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Whitney’s leadership invigorated the museum and its relationships; her work to build major partnerships between the Philbrook and other arts institutions was instrumental in the development of the Vilcek Foundation’s first major exhibition, Masterpieces of American Modernism from the Vilcek Collection, which toured to the Phoenix Art Museum and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. 

During her tenure at the Philbrook, Whitney also was appointed board president of the Southwest Art History Conference (SWAHC), which convenes in Taos, New Mexico, each autumn. The mission of the SWAHC is to advance the art history of the American Southwest through scholarship, publications, and by forging connections between art historians, museum professionals, and cultural historians with their annual conference. She has lectured and published on American art for the Denver Art Museum, Brandywine River Museum of Art, Wichita Art Museum, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. In 2020, Whitney was appointed director of curatorial affairs at the Honolulu Museum of Art, where she directs a curatorial team of seven and works closely with the museum’s collections and learning and engagement teams. With her background in museum curation, education, and interpretation, she has invested herself in strengthening of community and Pacific Rim partnerships and artists, as the coordinating curator of the Hawai’i Triennial 2022 and in an upcoming exhibition on the neuroarts, with Oahu’s newly established Brain Health Applied Research Institute, scheduled for 2026.