The Kimbell Art Museum announced Thursday the appointment of Emerson Bowyer as chief curator, a specialist in 18th and 19th British and French art considered by his peers to be a rock star in the field.

Before coming to the Kimbell, he was the Searle Curator and Curator, Painting and Sculpture, Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also worked at the Frick Collection, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Xavier F. Salomon, the director of the Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, is the former deputy director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick. They did not overlap at the museum but got to know each other when Bowyer, a native of Sydney, Australia, was a graduate art history student at Columbia University.

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He described Bowyer in glowing terms, and a perfect addition to the Kimbell staff, as well as a great complement to the staff, including deputy director George Shackleford.

“He’s super important and one of the star curators,” said Salomon, who is in Fort Worth setting up the Frick exhibition “The Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” which opens next week. “He thinks outside of the box. He thinks about how you can do things differently. He opens up doors that are not there.”

And, he added, “he has a great visual sense. And his acquisitions are not what you expect. He thinks about quality, which is great for growing a collection.”

Kimbell director Eric Lee backed up Salomon’s praise in a statement. “Emerson brings a strong history of organizing ambitious and timely exhibitions based on rigorous scholarship, along with a reputation as an engaging colleague and thoughtful leader. I am confident that he will contribute meaningfully to the Kimbell’s collection, programming, and professional staff.”

He was on the team that produced the massive survey of sculpture across 700 years (”Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body”) at the Met, a collection of 18th century British drawings (”Luminous Worlds: British Works on Paper 1760-1900”) at the ​​Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and an intimate solo exhibition at the Frick (”David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument”), for which he was credited for boosting the French sculptor’s profile among the public.

At the Art Institute, he co-curated with National Gallery of Art curator and former Kimbell curator C.D. Dickerson, a look into rarely displayed clay statues by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova with “Canova: Sketching in Clay,” which ran 2023-24. (Salomon, too, raved about the exhibition.) He also co-curated with Anne-Lise Desmas of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the exhibition, “Camille Claudel,” which resituated the French sculptor as more than just a talented sculptor whose life ended tragically but one whose life was, yes, tragic but who was also incredibly influential to Rodin. As Christopher Knight, the Pulitzer Prize winning former art critic at the Los Angeles Times, wrote, “the fascinating exhibition…unwinds the traumatic tale, and in the process refocuses the story in important ways.”

Among his most notable acquisitions at AIC was more than 2,000 drawings, paintings and sculptures from the Horvitz family. The collection is considered among the best outside of Europe. He also landed Claudel’s portrait bust of her brother Paul, one of the few by the sculptor in a United States museum.

“I look forward to my move to Fort Worth and am deeply honored to be appointed chief curator at the Kimbell Art Museum,” Bowyer said in a statement. “I’ve long admired its unique and renowned collection of masterpieces, as well as its commitment to excellence in research, exhibitions, and conservation. I’m excited to play a role in continuing that venerable tradition and to join the vibrant arts community in North Texas.”