Fowler Museum's chief curator: What ancient cultures can teach us
A chance to unearth our own ancient history, once lost amidst the ruins
Matthew Robb insists, "there is an ancient past in North America that most of us never get to learn about." Newly appointed as Fowler Museum chief curator, Robb intends to change that.
"Matthew Robb, the new chief curator of UCLA’s Fowler Museum, believes we still have much to learn from the ancient cultures of the Americas.Growing up in Texas and Alabama as the son of an art historian and a museum director, Robb took many family trips to Mexico. The ancient ruins he explored there made a lasting impression. At Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and worked in the campus museum, he remembered the “romantic feel” of Central Mexico and decided to build a career studying the area’s art and architecture. He earned a master’s degree at the University of Texas and a doctorate at Yale. Before being named chief curator of the Fowler Museum at UCLA in May, he was curator of the arts of the Americas at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
What about your Princeton experience led you to build a career in this field?
At that time, Mesoamerican archaeology and art history were undergoing profound changes. A lot of new information and new interpretations were coming to light. You got the sense that there were new discoveries to be made. Things change rapidly in this field. The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs that was happening in the ’70s and ’80s at a rapid clip and that continued into the ’90s was really exciting. I got to see a little of that. Scholars could tie names and events to dates, so you could talk about history in a new way. And that meant you could talk about art in a different way too."— Mary Daily, Feb. 13, 2017
Read the full article at the UCLA Newsroom website.