Bernice Rose, an art historian and curator whose groundbreaking exhibitions put traditional drawing on an equal footing with painting and sculpture, died on April 16 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

As a drawing curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she organized exhibitions showing that drawings were far more than preliminary works executed mainly on paper. In a catalogue that accompanied “Drawing Now: 1955-1975,” she wrote that drawing had become “a major and independent medium with distinctive expressive possibilities altogether its own.”

Bernice Rose left MoMA in 1993 to become director of special exhibitions at Pace Gallery in New York. In 2007, the Menil Collection in Houston appointed her the inaugural chief curator at its drawing institute. Although she retired from the Menil in 2014, she continued working as chief editor emerita of the “Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings,” published in 2018, as well as an adviser to the Houston collector Louisa Stude Sarofim.