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Joseph D. Ketner II (1955-2018) was a curator, art historian, and museum director specializing in modern and contemporary art, as well as nineteenth-century American and African American art. He earned his Bachelors and Master's degrees in Art History from Indiana University at Bloomington, and completed the J. Paul Getty Leadership Institute for Museum Management. As a graduate student at Indiana University, he focused his thesis on the African-American artist, Robert S. Duncanson, and has became the pre-eminent scholar on his work and career.
Following his Master's Degree, Ketner started a position as curator at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, followed by a stint as curator (1982-1989) and then director (1989-1998) of the Washington Gallery Museum of Art in St. Louis. In 1998 he was appointed the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University where he managed both the collections and the exhibition program.
From 2005-2008 Ketner served as the chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum, where he was responsible for a collection of more than 25,000 works, where he acquired works by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Nam June Paik, and Amy Sillman, among many others, and coordinated exhibitions by such artists as Francis Bacon, Bruce Nauman, and Andy Warhol.
In 2008 Ketner was appointed Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice at Emerson College, Boston, where he also held the position of distinguished curator-in-residence and served as Director of the Emerson Urban Arts, Media Arts Gallery from its founding in 2016 at, Emerson College, Boston.
Throughout most of his curatorial and academic career Ketner kept busy with additional roles as an independent art historian and curating and publishing exhibitions internationally, drawing from lifelong research projects reflected in his papers. His exhibitions, publications, and projects earned grants and awards from the American Association of Museums, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Henry Luce Foundation, and etant donnes. He and his exhibitions received press coverage from such periodicals as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Artforum, and Flash Art.
