News
HUMANITAS 2012 Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries and Libraries
As part of Oxford's symposium for the HUMANITAS2012 Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries and Libraries, take this rare opportunity to listen to:
Dr Christopher Brown & Dr Malcolm Rogers 'In Conversation'
Tuesday 8 May 2012, 4.30 – 6pm
Headley Lecture Theatre
Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PH
Free Admission, Spaces are limited. Places are allocated by tokens available from the Information Desk from 3pm onwards.
The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries & Libraries has been made possible by the generous support of Foster + Partners.
Dr Christopher Brown CBE, Director of the Ashmolean Museum, will be ‘In Conversation’ with Dr Rogers on Tuesday 8th May in the Ashmolean’s Headley Lecture Theatre from 4.30 – 6pm. Dr Rogers and Dr Brown will discuss and compare their experiences of overseeing the extensive renovation of the Ashmolean and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Malcolm Rogers was educated at Oxford, where he received an MA and a DPhil in English Language and Literature. He served as Deputy Director (from 1983) and Deputy Keeper (from 1985) at the National Portrait Gallery, London, before assuming the role of Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) in September 1994.
Malcolm is one of the most eminent museum directors in the world. Under his leadership, MFA has undertaken a transformative building expansion and renovation, which has increased space for its collection of more than 450,000 objects and enriched the ways in which visitors experience its works of art. This work was supported by a remarkable capital campaign that raised more than $500 million.
Malcolm has hugely expanded the Museum’s encyclopedic collection with more than 40,000 acquisitions, and he has worked to display the MFA’s riches on the world stage, presenting numerous innovative exhibitions in association with internationally renowned arts institutions. He has presided over the development of the MFA’s online collections database, featuring nearly all of the Museum’s holdings, which constitutes one of the largest online art museum collections in the world. He has also overseen the organization of nearly 300 exhibitions at the MFA, which have ranged from old masters to photographs, and Egyptian treasures to the artistry of guitar design.
The Museum has welcomed enormous new audiences since Malcolm first became its Director. Its extensive arts education programme has been enhanced, and admission fees for children 17 and younger have been abolished; its hours have been extended to become some of the longest of any major museum, and a series of free community days has been instituted. Approximately one million visitors each year now explore the infinite possibilities for education and inspiration at MFA.
An authority on sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century portraits, Malcolm has written extensively on Van Dyck’s English period as well as on photography and on London and its museums. Among his numerous honours are a CBE (2003), Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (2007), Commendatore al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (2009), Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel la Católica (2010), and Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011).
HUMANITAS is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge. Created by Lord Weidenfeld the Programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue with the support of a series of generous benefactors in collaboration with the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford.