Dr. Kit Smyth Basquin attended the Spence School, a New York all-girls’ K-12 school, where she was introduced to the field of art history. Since her formative years, she has been enthralled by the subject and sought to pursue a career within the art industry. After earning a master’s degree from Indiana University in 1970, Dr. Basquin served the Indianapolis Museum of Art as the assistant director of public relations for one year before moving on to the Washington Gallery in Frankfort and Indianapolis, Indiana, as director until 1979.
The director of her own art gallery, the Kit Basquin Gallery, in Milwaukee for two years, Dr. Basquin served several other universities and artistic facilities in increasingly responsible roles. At the Haggerty Museum of Marquette University, she was the curator of education from 1988 to 1995 and, from 1995 to 1998, she was the director of outreach at the Wisconsin Humanities Council in Milwaukee. A former curator of the Marvin Lowe Retrospective at the Indiana University Art Museum, she was also a marketing executive and exhibition manager at the auction house, William Doyle Galleries, in New York between 1999 and 2000.
Most recently, Dr. Basquin served the Brooklyn Museum of Art as a research associate, having subsequently spent the following 14 years as an administrator in Drawings and Prints at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and retired in 2014.
Outside of her work with the art community, Dr. Basquin is also an author, having written the 2020 biography “Mary Ellen Bute, 1906-1983: Pioneer Animator” about the film animator, who was one of the first female experimental animators of the 20th century. Lending her expertise to academia as well, she was an art history teacher at Concordia University in Milwaukee, at the Fine Arts School in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and in a Marquette University program in Gaza.
Sitting on the special events committee of the University Club in New York since 2016, Dr. Basquin also served the club as a member of the library and art committee for five years. She also maintains affiliation with the James Joyce Society and MasterVoices. Dr. Basquin currently resides in New York and continues to pursue her interest in the arts through singing and writing.
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