Meet the Staff
Meet the Curators
Karen Brooks-McWhorter
Curator, Whitney Western Art Museum
Karen Brooks McWhorter is the Margaret and Dick Scarlett Curator of Western American Art for the Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. After serving in the role from 2015 to 2022, she returned in late 2025 following leadership positions as Director of Curatorial, Education, and Museum Services and Chief Curator. She oversees a collection of more than 10,000 objects and develops exhibitions, installations, interpretation, and public programming. McWhorter has directed or curated major traveling exhibitions including Invisible Boundaries: Exploring Yellowstone’s Great Animal Migrations (2016), Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West (2018), Alfred Jacob Miller: Revisiting the Rendezvous (2023–24), and Tony Foster: Watercolour Diaries from the Green River (2023–24). She lectures widely on Western American art and has contributed to nine scholarly catalogues. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century Western American art, transatlantic artistic connections, and landscape imagery. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Dr. Ashlea Espinal
Assistant Curator, Whitney Western Art Museum
Dr. Ashlea Espinal joined the Whitney Western Art Museum in November 2021 as Curatorial Assistant and was promoted to Assistant Curator in May 2023. Before joining the Whitney, Espinal completed a MA in Art and Museum Studies at Georgetown University in 2010, and her doctorate in Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma in 2019.
Espinal has served as an art history adjunct instructor from 2019 to 2020 for both the University of Oklahoma and Bacone College. Additionally, she has held numerous internships at museums throughout the country, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Denver Art Museum. Her area of focus is contemporary Native arts, and her research and curatorial work merge the disciplines of art history, visual culture, and cultural memory. She is particularly interested in how knowledge is stored and transmitted through art, and how this enables history to be visually written through art and objects.