Surrounded by piles of U-Haul boxes with felt-tip penned reminders of what's in each carton, Henry Adams is settling into 103 Mather House as a full-time CWRU professor and chair of art history.

Over the past month, the two-block move to campus heralded a dramatic career shift for the former curator of American art at the Cleveland Museum of Art and for the man who has spent most of his time searching for and cataloguing some of the country's important works of art.

Pausing for a few minutes in organizing his office, Adams talked about how the lure of writing, research and teaching has pulled him in this new direction.

"At this point in life, most people are winding down in their careers, and I'm actually starting a new profession-although I'm taking all the old material that I used in the past and putting it together in new ways," Adams said.

The 53-year-old art historian joined CWRU in 1997. At the time, his faculty position was half-time while the rest of his work week was spent at the museum. While at the museum, he wrote an unpublished catalogue of CMA's American art collection-the first time one had been written for the museum-and he was curator for the Viktor Schreckengost exhibit in 2000.

Adams said he is enthusiastic about joining a group of "productive" colleagues who are in the process of publishing or recently published art books. Like his department colleagues, he is completing a work that he will send to Oxford University Press, a biography on Thomas Eakins, a 19th-century painter.

He also is curating the installation of "The Gilded Age"- one of eight traveling exhibits in the Treasures to Go series from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibit opens February 23 and continues through May 18.

"The exhibit includes some of the greatest hits of painting from the post-Civil War through 1920," Adams said.

Many of the exhibit's paintings and sculptures came from a particularly productive period from 1870-90.

For Adams, one sculpture in the exhibit has personal ties. It is a second-casting of a Saint-Gaudens memorial sculpture for the Henry Adams grave in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. This Henry Adams is the brother of Adam's great-grandfather, Charles Francis Adams Jr., and descendent of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

In addition to his curatorial duties, Adams will give several related talks:

• "The Gilded Age" at 6:30 p.m. March 5 in the Recital Hall of the museum
• "From Snakes to Angels: The Many Disguises of Abbott Thayer" begins at 6:30 p.m. March 12 in the museum's lecture hall
• "The Education of Henry Adams" is at 6:30 p.m. March 19 in the Recital Hall

The lectures and exhibit are free and open to the public. Looking Forward

The walk to and from the museum will continue for Adams as he teaches and strengthens the CWRU-CMA relationship—unique among colleges and universities—where all art history courses are taught in the museum by faculty and adjunct faculty who are curators at the museum.

With a campus-wide focus on undergraduate teaching, Adams said he wants to expand the use of technology in the classroom and envisions creating a new interdisciplinary course tentatively called, "Looking At . . . ."

"It would be a class about the appearance of things like roads, people, rocks and natural history and what these things tell us about them," Adams said.

"Art history teaching will become a richer experience," he continued. "My general goal is to make art history known as one of the most exciting things to do.