Adam Thomas, PhD is Curator of the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies. He is responsible for organizing and managing all aspects of the Bayer Center’s exhibition program. He represents the Center and the Aspen Institute with national and international communities and leads efforts to partner with other museums and cultural institutions.
Thomas served as Curator of American Art at the Palmer Museum of Art and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Art History at Penn State University. In this role, he oversaw more than 5,000 art objects, including works by many Bauhaus-trained artists such as Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Max Bill, Werner Drewes, and Lyonel Feininger. He also organized more than fifteen exhibitions, including Bauhaus Transfers: Albers/Rauschenberg, which commemorated the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, in 2019. Thomas led the reinstallation and reinterpretation of the American art collection at the new Palmer Museum of Art, a 73,000-square-foot building designed by Allied Works that opened June 1.
He was the editor of In a New Light: American Paintings to 1950 at the Palmer Museum of Art, the museum’s first comprehensive permanent collection catalog. Other publications to which Dr. Thomas contributed include Great Women Sculptors (Phaidon, 2024) and Where Art Meets Nature: The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden (Monacelli, 2024). He is currently an exhibition review editor at Panorama, the online journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.
Thomas earned his PhD in art history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his BA from New York University.