Most of us walk past more than 1,300 pieces of armor, shields and weapons on the way to somewhere else at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the collection just got a new keeper. The museum has named Chassica Kirchhoff the J. J. Medveckis Curator of Arms and Armor, and she arrives a year before the collection reaches a milestone.
Kirchhoff comes from the Detroit Institute of Arts and starts on November 30, 2026. The collection lives in the Kretzschmar von Kienbusch Galleries on the third floor, in Galleries 347 and 348, so there is plenty to see while the new curator settles in.
Who is Chassica Kirchhoff
Chassica Kirchhoff spent her Detroit years as a curator of European sculpture and decorative arts, looking after around 9,000 objects from antiquity through 1850. That meant armor and metalwork, but also stained glass, ceramics, tapestries, textiles and sculpture. Before Detroit she was the Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Arms and Armor.
She studied art history and studio art at Drury University, then earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in art history at the University of Kansas. Her dissertation asked how armor, and its images in painting and other media, worked as a carrier of meaning and memory in the late medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire. A scholar who also trained as a studio artist tends to look hard at surfaces.
In Detroit she organized Guests of Honor: Armor as Fashion, which brings together the armor of a knight, diplomat and courtier with the portrait that depicts it. She has also lectured on Jean de Croÿ, the 17th-century knight and collector whose gilded armor survives only in parts and whose portrait by Juan van der Hamen y León shows how he wanted to be seen.
Her 2023 book from Boydell Press, The Thun-Hohenstein Album: Cultures of Remembrance in a Paper Armory, follows the same thread. It looks at how a collection of armor drawn on paper became a place of remembrance. Put together, the work suggests a curator who sees armor as clothing, portraiture and memory, and not only as metal.
What Chassica Kirchhoff Takes Over
Kirchhoff will care for, install and develop the museum’s European arms and armor. The collection includes complete suits of armor, equestrian equipment, shields, helmets and weapons. Its core is the 1977 bequest of Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch, a New York businessman and philanthropist who lived from 1884 to 1976, which brought in more than a thousand works from classical antiquity through the nineteenth century.
The bequest turns 50 in 2027, and museum director Daniel Weiss said he wants her to shape new exhibitions and interpretations for the anniversary. The museum has not yet said what those will be. Kirchhoff said she is stepping in “following in the footsteps of exceptional scholars.”
She is one of several curatorial hires at the museum this year, along with Ann Marguerite Tartsinis in costume and textiles and Jennifer Thompson as deputy director of collections and exhibitions.
Armor is easy to treat as a row of objects behind glass, and the best way to wake it up is to ask who wore it, who paid for it and how they wanted to be remembered. Those are the questions Chassica Kirchhoff has spent her career on, and the anniversary year is a good time to ask them out loud.
Nothing is scheduled yet, and a new curator needs time with the collection before she plans anything. But with Chassica Kirchhoff the third floor is about to get a steward who treats a helmet like a portrait. Philadelphia has had this collection for decades, and I’m looking forward to whatever she shows us next.
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