Michael Marsland Photo
Amy Meyers
Amy Meyers’ directorship of the Yale Center for British Art will continue through 2017. Yale University announced last week that Meyers “has been reappointed to a third, five-year term … effective July 1, 2012.”
A university news release indicates that “in a letter announcing her reappointment, (Yale University President Richard) Levin said: ‘Faculty, staff, and friends of the Yale Center for British Art … all agree that the center is flourishing under (Meyers’) leadership. … Amy has transformed the Center into a world-class research center with an impressive range of interdisciplinary exhibitions and programs, which have received international recognition and acclaim.’”
Reached by email during a trip home from the United Kingdom, Meyers said, “I am deeply honored to have been renewed for another five-year term by President Levin, and I am indebted to my colleagues at Yale and elsewhere who have spoken on my behalf. The coming years will be exciting ones for the Center, during which our series of major, international loan exhibitions, publications, and programs will augment unparalleled opportunities for teaching and research in the collections. Our initiative to create an on-line catalogue of the collections, that is free and open-access, and seamlessly searchable across all categories, will reach completion, and in-depth, scholarly cataloguing will begin. Creating the means by which to search not only across Yale’s collections electronically, but also across collections of British art internationally, will be pursued with partners in the U.S. and U.K. This will be paired with collaborative projects in technical art history, through which our understanding of the field of British art should expand in new and important directions. Indeed, we look forward to collaborating with our sister collections at Yale in developing major object conservation laboratories on West Campus that will offer us the ability to analyze objects with new technologies and expertise in much more effective ways. The analysis of not only our collections, but also our great building, designed by Louis I. Kahn, will result in significant building conservation projects that will create beautifully refreshed gallery and work spaces. And, of course, the collections themselves will grow, building on the strength of Paul Mellon’s magnificent founding collection, and extending its reach in the healthiest of ways. I will take joy in working with my splendid colleagues at the Center; across the University; at our sister institution in London, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, under the guidance of its new director, Mark Hallett; and many others in the United States, the United Kingdom, and around the world, in pressing forward a more enlightened understanding of British art, to encompass the broadest reach of the field, both through time, and across the globe.”
According to the university’s news release, Meyers “earned her Ph.D. in American studies at Yale in 1985. Previously, she was curator of American art at the Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.”