Virginia Helen McCord Mecklenburg (born November 11, 1946) is an American art historian and curator.

Her master's thesis was titled "An Analysis of Role Playing as a Method of Teaching English to the Disadvantaged Learner.

[2] Her doctoral dissertation "American Aesthetic Theory, 1908-1917: Issues in Conservative and Avant-Garde Thought" was supervised by Professor Elizabeth Johns.

[2] Exhibitions organized or co-organized by Mecklenburg include "The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930-1945" (1989);[4] "Edward Hopper: The Watercolors" (1999);[5] "Earl Cunningham's America" (2008),[6] "Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg" (2010),[7] "African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond" (2012);[8] "Richard Estes' Realism" (2014);[9] and "Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women" (2024).

[13] Stephanie Stebich, who became SAAM director in 2017, effectively demoted Mecklenburg to "senior curator" in 2019; Stebich was subsequently removed from the director position by Smithsonian Institution management in mid-2024, after years of declining staff morale and complaints about workplace environment.