Office of Academic Appointments and Internships Blog Smithsonian Magazine

Caroline M. Riley

Caroline M. Riley is a Research Associate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis and serves as the NEH Long-Term Fellow at the New York Public Library (2022–2023). She completed her first book, MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938, as the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow at SAAM in 2019–2020. A curator and academic, she is a historian of American visual culture in a global context. Her next book, Thérèse Bonney and the Power of Global Syndicated Photography, explores the importance of photography, and its movement, between 1920 and 1950.

MoMA’s first International Exhibition Three Centuries of American Art (1938)

With over 750 artworks on view in Paris ranging from seventeenth-century colonial portraits to Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928) and spanning architecture, film, folk art, painting, prints, and sculpture, Three Centuries was the most comprehensive display of American art to date in Europe and a vital contributor to the internationalization of American art.

Caroline M. Riley

February 27, 2023