Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Thursday, March 15, 2018 in Events, HART, HART in Nashville, Lectures, News, VRC.

Maxwell Anderson, consulting scholar, Mediterranean Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, will address “Modern Challenges in Ancient Art” in a lecture held on Thursday, March 22, at 6:30 pm in the Frist Center Auditorium, 919 Broadway.

The exhibition Rome: City and Empire at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, on view through May 28, offers visitors insight into the objects used in worship, commemoration, and decoration in the Roman Empire. Anderson, author of Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016), will summarize multiple perspectives about the issues facing us today in protecting ancient heritage, including the care and supervision of excavations and museum collections, the international treaties and laws governing the circulation of objects from antiquity, and the state of the art trade and public and private collecting.

His background in the field of antiquities includes seven years as a curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1981–87), teaching positions in the field of Roman art history at the University of Rome II, Princeton University, and Emory University, and nearly thirty years as an art museum director (1987–2015), in addition to assisting mayors and city governments in improving their cities through the provision of vibrant cultural offerings.

He currently serves as president of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting the artwork of artists from the African American South, and the cultural traditions in which it is rooted. The foundation derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes (1902-1967) titled The Negro Speaks of Rivers, the last line of which is “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

His publications include the monograph Pompeian Frescoes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1987) and dozens of articles, along with two books: The Quality Instinct: Seeing Art Through a Museum Director’s Eye (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012) and Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to Know. He was decorated as a Commendatore dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Knight Commander in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic) in 1990, and named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic) in 2010. Anderson earned his bachelor’s degree in art history at Dartmouth College in 1977, and his doctorate at Harvard University in 1981.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is supported in part by Vanderbilt’s Department of the History of Art and the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies.