The Minneapolis Institute of Art today announced the appointment of Robert Cozzolino as the new Patrick and Aimee Butler curator of paintings. Cozzolino previously worked at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he has been senior curator and the Evelyn and Will Kaplan curator of modern art since 2004. He will start his new position on March 1, 2016. The current curator of paintings at the institute, Patrick Noon, will assume the new title of Elizabeth MacMillan chair of paintings.

During his tenure at the academy, Cozzolino curated over thirty exhibitions including retrospectives of Elizabeth Osborne, George Tooker, and Peter Blume. He is currently working on the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the impact of World War I on American artists, opening at the Pennsylvania Academy in November 2016. He also collaborated with David Lynch in 2014 to organize the largest-ever American museum exhibition of Lynch’s visual art.

Cozzolino was born in Chicago and earned his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dissertation on Ivan Albright.