John W. Coffey


John W. Coffey is an American art historian and curator.

Education and professional positions

Coffey attended Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, received his undergraduate degrees in history and art history from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and received his masters in art history from Williams College in Massachusetts. He currently is Deputy Director for Research, the Jim and Betty Becher Curator of American and Modern Art, and Curator of Judaic Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where he has been instrumental in making the museum a nationally renowned institution, having joined its staff in 1988.
He was acting director of Williams College's Museum of Art and curator of collections for Bowdoin College's Museum of Art. He has also been an adjunct faculty member of the Art History program at UNC-Chapel Hill.
His life partner is Ann Roth, an artist whose medium is textiles.

Areas of expertise

Coffey has published numerous articles as well as several books and exhibition catalogues reflecting his areas of expertise. He has often engaged in detective work resulting in the recovery and rediscovery of works previously thought to be lost, leading to a reassessment of their value. Examples include the oeuvre of painter Louis Remy Mignot and a large sculpture entitled “Saul Under the Influence of the Evil Spirit” by William Wetmore Story that had disappeared for 150 years.
Engagement with Mignot's work resulted from Coffey's work as a Southerner in a Southern art museum; pursuit of the Story sculpture resulted from his knowledge of collections across US museums. and "Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism". The latter exhibition, like the Mignot exhibition, received support from the Henry Luce Foundation and traveled after its opening at the NCMA. In 2016 the Boston Globe reviewer commented favorably on a Childe Hassam exhibition that Coffey co-organized with Austen Barron Bailly of the Peabody Essex Museum, where the exhibition was held. Coffey worked with Hal Weeks of the Shoals Marine Laboratory to identify precise locations for each painting, mirroring the artist's own exactitude.
In 2010 Coffey participated in a study of memorials in the state capital published by the North Carolina Historical Commission. His assessment of the Confederate memorials as art was negative, a point cited in 2017 during local and national debates about Civil War statues resulting in the controversial removal of many of them, including in Durham, North Carolina.