What will art museums look like in the
future? And how do they prepare for a world where maybe six times as many
visitors arrive via the Internet as walk through the doors?
This year’s Goodhue lecturer and
President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Emily Kernan Rafferty, spends a
lot of time thinking about the changing nature of collecting, exhibiting and
commissioning. Focusing on the Met's activities and history as a case study in her
talk at the John Jay Homestead, she said institutions are transcending the
limitations of physical space by developing new creative collaborations across
national and international boundaries and in the online world.
Mrs. Rafferty is the first woman to serve as chief
administrative officer in the Museum's history, and is now in her thirty-second
year of continuous service to the institution. She previously acted as Senior Vice President for External Affairs, and Vice
President for Development.
In her current role for the nation’s largest and most
comprehensive art museum, Mrs. Rafferty
supervises more than 1,500 museum employees in such areas as development,
membership, technology and information services, human resources, merchandising,
external affairs, legal affairs, government relations, finance, security, and
construction.
The seeds for the
Metropolitan were planted on July 4, 1866, when John Jay II, a prominent
New York lawyer and the grandson of founding father John
Jay, gave a speech proposing that he and his compatriots create a "national institution and gallery of art." Over the
next four years, American civic leaders, art collectors, and philanthropists
came to support the project.
Today, the Museum's collections of more than two million
works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture from around the globe
draw millions of visitors each year.
The Annual Goodhue Lecture is
dedicated to the memory of former state legislator and longtime supporter, Mary
B. Goodhue, in recognition of a generous donation made by her family, to
further education programming at John Jay Homestead.
The series has hosted numerous prominent speakers since
its inaugural lecture in 2004 by Cokie Roberts. Past speakers include
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Lucia Stanton, Chief Judge Judith Kaye, and Mark
Malloch-Brown.
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