A life portrait in pictures

Museum’s curator selects highlights from an influential career

Museum’s curator selects highlights from her influential career.

It’s hard not to talk numbers when you’re talking about Museum of Fine Arts, Houston curator Anne Wilkes Tucker.

During 39 years, as the museum grew from a modest provincial institution, she built of one of the world’s great photography collections. When she arrived in 1976, the museum owned 141 images, half of which had just been donated by Target. Today, the collection holds 30,000 works representing 4,000 artists, encompassing the history of the medium across every continent — and into space.

Last week, Tucker, 69, was counting boxes, hoping 25 would be enough to hold all she needs to take home from her office when she retires Tuesday.

Tucker, who grew up in Baton Rouge, La., visited her first museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as a college student. She was so moved by that experience, she majored in art history and photography. Later, at the Rochester Institute of Photography, she met Beaumont Newhall, who directed the George Eastman House and wrote the classic textbook “The History of Photography,” and Nathan Lyon, (the Eastman’s co-director; then she interned with John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art.

“You couldn’t do any better than that. I was just so lucky with mentors,” Tucker said.

Houston was lucky Hermann Hospital hired Tucker’s first husband, a doctor fresh out of medical school, the same year museum director William C. Agee needed a curator to handle the Target donation.

“I’m a great believer in things just happening in the right way,” Tucker said.

She brought an insatiable passion for history, a belief in photography’s critical and cultural influences and a delight in discovery— qualities her next boss, the late Peter Marzio, shared and encouraged for 30 years. He assigned some of the projects that became seminal shows, including “The Art of Photography: 18391989,” 1997’s “Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror,” 2003’s “The History of Japanese Photography” and 2012’s “War/ Photography,” which was a decade in the making.

Many of the more than 150 exhibitions Tucker organized broke new ground, one of the reasons Time Magazine named her the nation’s best curator in 2001.