Marla Prather brings experience, an agile mind and a deep aesthetic appreciation to her new position as senior consultant to the department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I was reared on painting and sculpture at the Met as a graduate student at Columbia,” says the 52-year-old Prather. “I still have a Midwesterner’s infatuation with New York City. The idea of walking into the Metropolitan Museum every day is beyond my expectations.”

As head of the department of 20th-century art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the late 1990s, Prather organized an enchanting Alexander Calder retrospective and opened its popular sculpture garden. Although her doctoral dissertation was on Paul Gauguin, Prather notes, “at the National Gallery, I moved forward in time.” And she moved on in 1999 to become curator of postwar art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. She remained in the city while helping the Tate Modern assemble its American collection as its curator for American art. Prather’s duties at the Met have yet to be determined as the museum copes with the upcoming departure of Philippe de Montebello. She will, however, be reporting to Gary Tinterow, the Engelhard curator in charge of her department. Prather is sorry she won’t be working with Montebello. Still, she has experienced “regime change before,” and as she puts it, “It’s the Met, after all.” "Prairie Girl" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents.