Horace Ballard

During his time at YDS and the Institute of Sacred Music, Horace D. Ballard (he/they) ‘10 M.A.R. focused his studies on visual art. Prior to attending YDS, he earned his B.A. in English Literature and American Studies from the University of Virginia. After his time at YDS, he went on to earn an M.A. in American Studies and a Ph.D. in American Visual Culture from Brown University.

While at Yale, he worked at the Yale University Art Gallery, where he realized that he could create a career in the multidisciplinary field of art. Ballard described his belief in the power of art to WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, saying, “I deeply believe that academic museums have the ability to actively demonstrate the ways by which beauty leads us to justice, the ways by which beauty and all of its aesthetic messiness and capacity and all of its sumptuous subjectivity garners our attention.”

Ballard marks their time at Yale Divinity School as a turning point in their professional and personal trajectory. According to Ballard, “In my last year at Yale, I worked with the wonderful then-Deputy Director Pam Franks and five other student co-curators on the exhibition ‘Embodied: Black Identities in American Art’ that critically attended to the Yale University Art Gallery’s holdings of work made by artists of the African Diaspora over 400 years.”

In June 2021, the Harvard Art Museums announced Ballard’s appointment to the Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. Associate Curator of American Art position. Commenting on his appointment, Ballard said, “I believe in the capacious potential of academic museums to refine the ethics of our attention … As a graduate student, and I experienced firsthand the power of art to incite empathy, wonder, and sociopolitical change. The field of American art is in a period of reckoning and reflection.”

In their current role at the Harvard Art Museums, which officially began in September 2021, Ballard “investigates the art, ideas, and visual cultures of the United States and the Americas,” with particular interests in “gender and race in 18th- and 19th-century portraiture, colonial men’s fashion, and the visual and material cultures of religion.” They arrived at the Harvard Art Museums with professional experience from the Williams College Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Monticello / Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the Birmingham Museum of Art, at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. His curatorial work continues to explore art through questions around justice, ethics, boundaries, and limits. Ballard affirms the capacity of engagement with art to build empathy, raise questions, spark emotions, challenge assumptions, and provoke long-awaited reckoning.