While I was doing that job, I started working on my masters degree at Queen's College and that’s when I got the internship at the Brooklyn Museum. I got a job working at the Institute of Fine Arts, which is NYU's graduate program in art history. When you first moved to New York, did you already have a job lined up? It’s been a wonderful place to bring my experience in visual art and material culture. Well, I'm very grateful for the people on my staff who know a great deal more about history than I do, but I have learned a huge amount. You must be an expert on Brooklyn history now! This is the place for me!Īnd how many years have you been here now? I loved the collection, which is a mixture of visual material, paintings, photographs and maps, books and archival documents. I loved the mission of the institution, which was to explore and understand and make accessible the history of Brooklyn. I imagine that position doesn't come up very often.Įxactly. I had done some consulting work for the Brooklyn Historical Society, so when the position of President came up I thought, “Okay this is it this is my moment.” I had gotten to a point in my life where I was ready to run an institution. I was there for a number of years, but I became restless. It’s one of the greatest museums in the world and one of my favorite places. Then I got a call from the Museum of Modern Art asking me to be the Deputy Director for Education there, which I just simply couldn't resist. I was the Deputy Director for Education there. I started there as an intern and worked there for 27 years. I worked at the Brooklyn Museum for many, many years. How long did you work for the Brooklyn Museum? So it was a big leap for me to move from art museums to a history museum. I've spent most of my professional life in art museums. That’s such an interesting perspective, to view the art of each time period as a way to understand its history.Īrt opens up new ways of understanding the world for me! I’m a visual learner. Art history was a wonderful framing device for me to understand history and society in general. It was something that was very powerful for me and called me back over and over again. As a child, I went to museums all the time. I think he instilled in my mother and her sister an enormous love for art and art history. He spent his days at the stock exchange in New York and on the weekends he painted. My mother's father was a very talented amateur artist. Were you always interested in history and art? We bought a lovely house with a garden and we've been there ever since. To this day I don't really understand what happened. Then, within a couple of years that was all gone. Which, to be honest, we didn't really even realize. When we first moved, there were crack vials everywhere. It's changed an enormous amount, even within the first few years of us living there. I was commuting to Brooklyn and my husband was commuting to New Jersey and we said, "This is ridiculous, something has to give.” So we moved to Brooklyn in 1989. By the time we had our first child, I was working at the Brooklyn Museum and the commute from Washington Heights was too long. I met my husband and we moved together to Washington Heights. I felt like I could come and go as I pleased. Everything was open late, and there were always a lot of people around. I was a single woman and that area was a comfortable place for me to be. Very, very different! I originally moved to the Upper East Side. Wow! New York must have been a completely different place then. I thought that if I wanted to work seriously in the museum world I should move to a place where the museum scene was the most dynamic, so I packed my bags and moved to New York. That was my first museum job and it made me realize that what I really wanted to do was museum education. After I graduated, I briefly worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I also went to college there, at Northwestern University, and studied art history. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is just outside of Chicago.
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