Crawford Alexander Mann III is the curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; he joined the museum’s staff in April 2017. Mann’s responsibilities include research, exhibitions, and acquisitions related to the museum’s collection of approximately 25,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors dating from the eighteenth century to the present. His research interests include Italian-American artistic exchange on the Grand Tour, artists of the American South, the impact of East Asian watercolor and printmaking traditions on American art, and the evolving visual constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender.

Before joining SAAM, Mann was the Joan and Macon Brock Curator of American Art at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, from 2011 to 2017, where he oversaw a collection of more than 8,000 works by American artists. Prior to that, Mann held a three-year Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught and created exhibitions for the department of prints, drawings, and photographs. His research has also been supported by a Theodore Rousseau Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a year in Rome and a Terra Foundation predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Mann earned a bachelor’s degree in art history and religious studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002. He received both an M.A. in the history of art (2003) and an M.Phil. in the history of art (2005) from Yale University. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate at Yale University, completing his dissertation titled “When in Rome: Italian Travel and the Pursuit of the Ideal Male Body in Antebellum American Art.”