Alvia Wardlaw

From 1995 to 2009, Wardlaw was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she organized more than 75 exhibitions on African and African-American art. She was adjunct curator of African-American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1994. Her exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, a collection of quilts by outstanding quilters from Alabama, broke attendance records at major museums across the 11 cities to which it traveled and was one of the most talked-about museum shows of 2002 in America and beyond. She has presented exhibitions that added to the American art canon the work of major, previously undercelebrated African-American artists, in particular John Biggers, Thornton Dial and Kermit Oliver. Her own photographs were also shown across Texas. She grew up and lives in Third Ward, Houston, Texas.

Wardlaw received a B.A. degree in Art History from Wellesley College in 1969. In 1986 she earned an M.A. degree in Art History from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. In 1996 she received a Ph.D. degree in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Alvia J. Wardlaw (born November 5, 1947) is an American art scholar, and one of the country's top experts on African-American art. She is Curator and Director of the University Museum at Texas Southern University, an institution central to the development of art by African Americans in Houston. She also is a professor of Art History at Texas Southern University. Wardlaw is a member of the Scholarly Advisory Council of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and co-founded the National Alliance of African and African American Art Support groups in 1998. Wardlaw was University of Texas at Austin's first African-American PhD in Art History.