John Ravenal

Also while at the VMFA, Ravenal’s exhibitions included Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art; Outer & Inner Space, a history of video art; Robert Lazzarini’s first solo museum exhibition; and Artificial Light, displayed at VCUarts Anderson Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. During his tenure at the VMFA, the museum acquired the Kehinde Wiley painting "Willem van Heythuysen".

In 2015 Ravenal became executive director of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts. His appointment to DeCordova as Executive Director was announced by the Center for Curatorial Leadership, of which he had been a Fellow since 2012.

Ravenal served as the fourth president of the Association of Art Museum Curators (2009–11).

Ravenal has contributed to exhibition catalogues and essays about the artist Sol LeWitt and other contemporary artists. He worked on the TV series documentary Art in the Twenty-First Century (2001) and the biographical documentary, Herb & Dorothy 50X50 (2013).

John B. Ravenal (born August 1, 1959 in Providence, Rhode Island) is an art historian, writer, and museum curator. Before 1998, he was the Associate Curator of 20th-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 1998 to 2015 he was curator of contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, where he organized exhibitions of Ryan McGinness: Studio Visit (2014); Xu Bing: Tobacco Project(2011), and Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit (2010). He was curator of the VMFA's Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch exhibition, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life. His lecture about the exhibition took place in the Leslie Cheek Theater in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The show opened in November 2016 in partnership with the Munch Museum in Oslo. He is the author of the exhibition catalogue Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation.