Educator Open House: Sargent Claude Johnson

About the Speakers

Dennis Carr joined The Huntington as the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art in January 2020. For the previous 13 years, he was the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His recent exhibitions include the critically acclaimed “Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia”; “Cecilia Vicuña: Disappeared Quipu”; and “Collecting Stories: Native American Art.” He contributed to Art and Industry in Early America (2016), which won the Charles F. Montgomery Book Prize and the Historic New England Book Prize. He holds graduate degrees in the history of art at Yale University and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and he was a 2019 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. His projects at The Huntington have included “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” the biennial of contemporary art with the Hammer Museum, and “Borderlands,” a reinstallation of the Virginia Steele Scott and Lois and Robert F. Erburu Galleries of American Art, as well as an ongoing partnership with Ghetto Film School.

Lauren Cross is the Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts, where she works from The Huntington’s outstanding collection strengths in American folk art, Arts and Crafts, Greene and Greene, and Colonial-era material to grow previously underrepresented areas of the collection. Cross received her Ph.D. in multicultural women’s and gender studies from Texas Woman’s University and her MFA in visual arts from Lesley University, where her research focused on the works of women artists of color, decorative arts and material culture, and African American fiber traditions. She directed and produced the documentary The Skin Quilt Project in 2010, which explored the intersections of skin color politics in African American quilting traditions, and curated the traveling exhibition “The Skin Quilt Project: Uplifting Our Culture, Celebrating Tradition.” Cross taught for several years at the University of North Texas, while also curating and co-curating several culturally significant exhibitions at museums and cultural institutions across the country, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Artpace San Antonio, and the Houston Museum of African American Culture. Her projects at The Huntington include the community festival “Quilting a Community: Celebrating Gee’s Bend” (an extension of the exhibition “Gee’s Bend: Shared Legacy”) and an upcoming exhibition on the Los Angeles ceramist Doyle Lane in 2026.