Ross Fox

Bio

B.A. (Honours), Art History, University of Windsor, 1972
M.A., Museology, Wayne State University, 1975
Ph.D., Art History & Archaeology, University of Missouri, 1987

Ross Fox is a decorative arts and material culture specialist who retired from the ROM in December 2011, where he was the curator responsible for Canadian Decorative Arts. He remains a ROM Research Associate and is an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Fine Arts, University of Toronto. Though primarily a Canadianist, Fox also has extensive experience with the fine and decorative arts of Europe and the United States, particularly of the 18th and 19th centuries. Previously he was associated with the Mead Art Museum (Amherst College, Massachusetts), Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), National Gallery of Canada, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Fox was the curatorial interpreter and developer of the decorative arts exhibits in the Sigmund Samuel Gallery of Canada, which opened in October 2007, as part of the ROM’s building expansion. Currently he is writing a book on Canadian silver. Among other research projects are: furniture of Lower Canada (Quebec) 1763-1837; Loyalist and early American artifacts in Canada; period rooms in museums; and Grand Manan Island as a topographical and symbolic landmark in Canadian landscape art.

Major publications include Quebec and Related Silver at the Detroit Institute of Arts (Wayne State University Press, 1978); Presentation Pieces and Trophies from the Henry Birks Collection of Canadian Silver (National Gallery of Canada, 1985); The Art Gallery of Hamilton: Seventy-Five Years (1914-1989) (1989); and The Canadian Painters Eleven from the McLaughlin Gallery (Amherst College, 1994). He also wrote the section on Canadian silver in Grove’s Dictionary of Art (1996).