Maxwell Anderson has stayed busy since taking the reigns as The Eugene McDermott Director of the DMA. Staff restructuring has become an almost daily procedure. Last week Oliver Mesley was bumped up from Senior Curator of European and American Art to Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, and former Chair of Collections and Exhibitions, Tamara Wootton-Bonner, was renamed Associate Director of Collections and Exhibitions.
Anderson made his first big push for expansion ten days ago, when he appointed his former colleague Robert Stein as the museum's new Deputy Director. Now his focus has shifted to the DMA's conservation department, which is currently too small to allow growth within the museum's permanent collections. To solve this problem, Anderson has appointed Mark Leonard, an artist and former Head of Paintings Conservation Department at California's J. Paul Getty Museum, to assume the newly created position, Chief Conservator.
Leonard will oversee the growth of DMA's in-house conservation capabilities when he takes over on July 1, 2012. More than 1 million dollars has been pledged to the new conservation studio and program expansion; the museum currently has only one staff conservator and an at-capacity studio space. Leonard brings nearly three decades of experience in conservation and restoration technology, degrees in art history and paintings conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and has served with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty, and restored selected paintings from the Frick Collection, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and many others.
Welcome Mark Leonard, we are excited to have you and your talents here in Dallas.
