Woolfenden, William E. (William Edward), 1918-1995

William Woolfenden (1918-1995) was from Detroit, Mich. and New York, N.Y. and an art administrator and director of the Archives of American Art.

Art administrator, museum director, art historian. Died 1995.

William E. Woolfenden, Art administrator; director, Archives of American Art; Detroit, Mich. and New York, N.Y.; d. 1995.

William E. Woolfenden, who was born in Detroit and received bachelor and master's degrees from Wayne State University, served as the Director of Education at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A scholar of American Art, Woolfenden teamed up with Lawrence A. Fleischman, a wealthy Detroit businessman and art collector, and in 1954 they founded the Archives of American Art, initially as an adjunct to the Detroit Museum. Woolfenden was named assistant director in 1960, and later became the archives first full-time director. From his Manhattan base, Woolfenden spent the next nineteen years building what would become the world's largest archive devoted to American art with a collection totaling 400,000 photographs and over 10 million primary-source documents. The archives eventually joined the Smithsonian Institution in 1970 and had research centers in Boston, Washington, and San Francisco, in addition to Detroit. After serving nineteen years as director of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, Woolfenden retired in 1983 and died in 1995 in New Haven Connecticut at the age of 77.

Art administrator; New York, N.Y.

Director of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Died 1995.