Full Name: Shepherd, Dorothy G. Payer
Other Names:
- Dorothy G. Shepherd
- Dorothy G. Payer Shepherd
- Dorothy Shepherd
Gender: female
Date Born: 15 August 1916
Date Died: 13 August 1992
Place Born: Welland, Ontario, Canada [Welland, Ontario, Canada]
Place Died: Asheville, North Carolina, US [Asheville, North Carolina, US]
Home Country/ies: Canada and United States
Subject Area(s): Egyptian (ancient), Islamic (culture or style), Middle Eastern, and textile art (visual works)
Career(s): art historians and curators
Institution(s): Cleveland Museum of Art
Overview
Early woman museum curator in the US; medieval textiles, ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art specialist. Born in Canada of English parents, Shepherd moved to Fenton, MI, with them at the age of two. She received a B.A.(1939) and an M.A.(1940) in Oriental Civilizations from the University of Michigan. She studied Islamic art likely under Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu (1896 -1949) during her time there. She started a Ph.D in Islamic Art and Hispano-Islamic textiles at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, advised by Walter W. S. Cook. From 1942 to 1944, she worked as an assistant curator of decoration at the Cooper Union Museum, now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Benefiting from the textile collections donated by J. P. Morgan to the Museum, Shepherd published her first scholarly article “The Hispano-Islamic Textiles in the Cooper Union Collection” in 1943.
Shepherd paused her graduate work in 1944 to assist in art recovery in London, Luxembourg, Frankfurt and Berlin until the end of WWII. Upon her return to the US, she is believed to have continued her education; however, she never completed her dissertation or earned a doctorate, the war likely diverting her focus away from the school (Hanson). Starting in 1947, she worked as an associate curator of textiles at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Funded by the Ford Foundation, she conducted a six-month research trip to Spain in 1949. She married Ernst Payer, (1904-1981) an Austrian architect in 1951. She has taught Near Eastern Art as an Adjunct Professor at Case-Western Reserve University beginning in 1956. Shepherd was appointed curator of textiles and Near Eastern Art in 1968 and Chief Curator of Textiles and Islamic Art in 1979. In 1981, the year of her husband’s death, she retired from the Museum and moved to Florida. After retirement, she continued to serve as a research consultant to the Museum. She wrote the chapter on Sasanian art for the Cambridge History of Iron, Vol.III (1983). She died in Asheville, NC, in 1992. Her last work on Sasanian iconography was published in 1994. In 2017, New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts established an endowed fellowship in Shepherd’s memory.
As the Curator of Textiles, she authored eighty-three publications mainly about Islamic art and textiles, with most of them published in the Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Besides, she was an active member of the Directing Council of Centre International d’Etudes des Textiles Anciens, of the board of governors of the American Research Center, and of the board of trustees of the American Institute of Iranian Studies.
Selected Bibliography
- [complete bibliography] Influential Women of the CMA: Dorothy Shepherd. Ingalls library https://clevelandart.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=76340981
- “The Hispano-Islamic Textiles in the Cooper Union Collection,” Chronicle of the Museum for the Arts of Decoration of the Cooper Union 1, no. 10 (Dec. 1943): 356-401.
- “Sasanian Art” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol.III, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, 1055–1112. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
- “Saljūk Textiles – A Study in Iconography.” In The Art of the Saljūks in Iran and Anatolia, edited by Robert Hildebrand, 210-213. California: Mazda Publishers, 1994.
Sources
- [obiturary] “Obituary – Dorothy G. Shepherd”. Archive.org. August 20, 1992. Retrieved Dec 10, 2024. https://archive.org/details/cmapr3766.
- [biography with complete bibliography] LaFay, Chrysta. “LibGuides: Influential Women of the CMA: Dorothy Shepherd.” Accessed December 10, 2024. https://clevelandart.libguides.com/cmawomen/dshepherd.
- Milliken, William M. “Appointment of Dorothy Shepherd.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 34, no. 4 (1947): 64–64.
- Hanson, Robin, and Holly Witchey. “Dorothy Shepherd and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ancient Near Eastern and Islamic Art Collection.” Collections 20, no. 3 (September 1, 2024): 461–73.
Archives
Cleveland Museum of Art Archives
Contributors: Yuhuan Zhang