Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art
1133 East Seventh Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-7509
1133 East Seventh Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-7509
Jennifer (Jenny) McComas joined the Eskenazi Museum of Art in 2004 as Curator of Western Art after 1800, and was appointed Curator of European and American Art in 2015. She manages a collection of about 6,000 paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts ranging from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. She conceptualized the collection’s complete reinstallation in 2019. McComas is also affiliate faculty with IU’s Jewish Studies Program and Institute for European Studies. Her research interests include provenance research and the history of collecting and exhibitions; the historiography of Jewish art; and German, Jewish, and American modernist art.
McComas established and manages the museum’s World War II-Era Provenance Research Project in accordance with the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. She has presented on related topics nationally and internationally, and was a participant in the Smithsonian Institution’s German-American Provenance Research Exchange Program for Museum Professionals. More recently, McComas developed a Jewish Art Initiative to increase the visibility of—and scholarship on—Jewish art and artists through acquisitions, exhibitions, loans, and programming. She is currently organizing a related exhibition, Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970, a major loan exhibition scheduled to open at the Eskenazi in September 2025, with a catalogue published by Yale University Press. She is the co-founder of a national working group for Curators of Jewish Art and Judaica.
McComas’s other exhibitions include Swing Landscape: Stuart Davis and the Modernist Mural (with an award-winning catalogue, also published by Yale); Pioneers and Exiles: German Expressionism at the Indiana University Art Museum; and collaborations with the Tsinghua University Art Museum in Beijing and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. Her publications include contributions to exhibition catalogues and edited volumes and to journals such as the Journal of Art Historiography, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. Her research and exhibitions have been supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation. McComas received her BA in Art History from the College and Wooster and her MA and PhD in Art History from Indiana University.
