New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has made three curatorial appointments: Diana Craig, who will head the department of Egyptian art; Ronda Kasl, the new curator of colonial Latin American art; and Joanne Pillsbury, a new curator in the department of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
A member of the Met’s Egyptian department since 1996, Craig has served as acting head of the department since the retirement last summer of Dorothea Arnold, who had been head of the department for 21 years. Craig is organizing the upcoming exhibition “Cleopatra’s Needle” (Dec. 3, 2013-Jun. 8, 2014), which marks the conservation of the Egyptian obelisk behind the museum in Central Park.
Kasl comes to the Met from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where she has been employed since 1992, working her way up from an assistant curator to the senior curator of painting and sculpture before 1800. Her book The Making of Hispano-Flemish Style: Art, Commerce and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Castile is soon to be published. Earlier this year, Kasl completed a six-month Chester Dale Fellowship at the Met in the department of European paintings. This is a new position at the museum.
Pillsbury, also in a new position, was formerly the associate director of scholarly programs at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, where she was appointed in 2012. She also served as a director of studies for the pre-Columbian program at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., from 2005-12.
