BACKGROUND

Art historian and arts administrator Maxwell L. Anderson has served as a museum curator, museum director, and foundation president, and today applies his experience to addressing unresolved issues in the art world, from advocating the inclusion of Black artists from the American South in the canon of art history to uncovering major artworks lost over time.  

Anderson is the author of dozens of publications, including Pompeian Frescoes in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1987), and The Quality Instinct: Seeing Art Through a Museum Director’s Eye (American Alliance of Museums, 2012). His most recent book is Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016 and Tantor Media audiobook, 2019), and he is a regular contributor to Apollo Magazine.

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, teaching positions in the field of Roman art history at the University of Rome II, Princeton University, and Emory University, and nearly three decades as an art museum director. Since 2012 he has also served as a Trustee of the NewCities Foundation, and is a Distinguished Consulting Scholar in the Office of the Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

He today also serves as COO of LMI Group International and CEO of NC3, a tech incubator advancing technological development in data science and scientific computing for the visual arts and the broader field of cultural heritage.

SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION & COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP

Since 2016 he has served as president of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Community Partnership, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the work of African American artists from the South, and supporting their communities by fostering economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement. The Foundation derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes (1902-67) titled The Negro Speaks of Rivers, the last line of which is "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." Its mission is to include their contributions in the canon of American art history through acquisitions from the Foundation's collection by major museums, as well as through exhibitions, programs, and publications. Anderson's involvement with the collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation dates back to his first museum directorship at Emory University''s Carlos Museum beginning in 1987.

The Foundation’s holdings are extensive, with almost 1,000 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of whom are women. Among the artists represented are Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary T. Smith, Joe Minter, Nellie Mae Rowe, Purvis Young, Emmer Sewell, Ronald Lockett, Joe Light, and the quilters of Gee’s Bend. The Foundation’s collection is an essential resource for students, scholars, and the public alike.

In November 2014 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired 57 works from the Foundation’s collection, including major works by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and Nellie Mae Rowe, and twenty important quilts dating from the 1930s to 2003 created by women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. In 2017, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquired 62 works by 22 artists from the Foundation in February, Including Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holly, Mary T. Smith, Joe Minter, and Gee’s Bend quilters Annie Mae Young and Jessie T. Pettway. Over 40 museums have followed suit to date, including the National Gallery of Art. The Foundation is at work to transfer hundreds more works to multiple museums in the coming years.

The Souls Grown Deep Community Partnership has, since 2019, made multiple grants and supported projects addressing systemic racism and advancing economic and social justice for the communities that gave rise to the artists represented in the Foundation.

MUSEUM EXPERIENCE

From 1987 to 2015, Anderson directed art museums in five North American cities: Atlanta, Toronto, New York, Indianapolis, and Dallas.

In 1988 as director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta (1987-1995), he inaugurated a series of loan projects highlighting unpublished treasures from the storerooms of some of the world’s leading museums in London, Paris, Rome, Mexico City, and elsewhere, looking for alternatives to buying antiquities from the illicit trade, expanded the Museum with architect Michael Graves, and greatly enlarged the permanent collection.

During his directorship at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (1995-1998), he led the creation of a national exhibition indemnity program, restituted five 17th-century Italian drawings to the Berlin State Museums, which had been looted during the Second World War, initiated the illustrated web-based publication of the museum’s collections, made significant acquisitions of European and Canadian art, and organized numerous exhibitions including The Courtauld Collection, one of the Gallery's five best-attended exhibitions in its history.

As director of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1998-2003) he opened the museum six days a week instead of five, initiated the first multinational art purchase, a work by Bill Viola today jointly owned by the Whitney Museum, the Pompidou, and the Tate, to cope with the large scale of many contemporary artworks in variable media, and created a seat for an artist on the Board of Trustees, with Chuck Close as its first incumbent. He established the Museum's first conservation program, introduced new media and architecture as collecting and programming areas, established an M.A. program in curatorial studies with Columbia University, and grew attendance to some 670,000 annually.

In 2002, while President of the Association of Art Museum Directors, he announced the formation of a Task Force on Archaeological Materials & Ancient Art, which he chaired for the better part of a decade.

He has long championed the rights of artists to receive fair tax treatment when donating works of art to museums, and the rights of artists to receive royalty payments for resale of their works. Shortly after the attacks of September 11th, as chair of its Art Issues Committee, he introduced a successful motion at the Association of Art Museum Directors to forego terrorism insurance, helping assure that U.S. and international loan exhibitions could continue uninterrupted. Four months before the onset of hostilities in Iraq, in November 2002, he co-authored an op-ed piece in The Washington Post warning against looting of museums and destruction of sites in the event of an invasion, and helped lead a delegation to the Pentagon to press the case. His seminal 2004 essay for the Getty Leadership Institute, titled “Metrics of Success for Art Museums,” was called an “influential broadside” regarding the proper evaluation of museum performance by The Washington Post.

In 2006, as The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, he advocated transparency in museum practice through a Dashboard chronicling real-time performance measures as well as complete documentation of and rationale for the deaccessioning of artworks, including posting valuations of prospective sales prior to placing objects in the art market. In 2007 he urged U.S. art museums to adopt 1970 as a bright line when considering acquisitions of archaeological material and ancient art, and helped lead the Association of Art Museum Directors to that standard in 2008. That same year Anderson joined a lawsuit against every prosecutor in the State of Indiana to strike down a statute abridging freedom of expression. In 2008 IMA was the first museum to be conferred Energy Star by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy, an award recognizing products and businesses for utilizing energy efficient products and practices. The IMA was then awarded the 2009 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation’s highest honor for museums and libraries, presented by First Lady Michelle Obama.

In 2010, he advocated the relaxation of environmental control standards in art museums to save energy and reduce waste. He helped launch two consecutive projects to build international libraries of digital media documenting the collections and activities of art museums—one for still images (AMICO), and one for video (ArtBabble). In 2011 he led the formation of a partnership between the Association of Art Museum Directors and the United Negro College Fund to create a national program incentivizing students of color to enter the art museum profession. That same year the IMA represented the United States at the 54th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, with the exhibition Gloria, presenting works by the collective Allora & Calzadilla.

After being appointed director of the Dallas Museum of Art in the summer of 2011, he launched a program in paintings conservation, added staff and programming dedicated to Islamic art, securing a 15-year renewable loan of the Keir Collection, raised over $40 million for the Museum’s endowment and special projects, made significant additions to the permanent collection, signed memoranda of understanding with Turkey and Italy as part of an art-for-expertise exchange program named DMX, and founded a Laboratory for Museum Innovation with seed capital to develop collaborative pilot projects in the areas of collections access, visitor engagement, and digital publishing. In the fall of 2012 he announced the DMA’s return to a policy of free general admission as well as a novel loyalty program, DMA Friends, attracting over 100,000 members. During his directorship, the DMA also embarked on an unprecedented partnership with the University of Texas at Dallas, providing offices and seminar spaces for the newly established Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History. He stepped down from the Dallas Museum of Art in September 2015 to join the leadership team of the New Cities Foundation.

As chairman of the Dallas Arts District Foundation from 2013-2015, he oversaw the planning and coordination of the largest arts district in the United States. He co-chaired the June 2014 New Cities Summit, which attracted over 800 delegates from 41 nations to the Dallas Arts District for a gathering to improve the future of cities. In the summer of 2014 he oversaw the inaugural US edition of Art Everywhere, arguably the largest public service campaign about art, yielding tens of thousands of outdoor media replicas of American art from five leading art museums.

EDUCATION AND HONORS

Anderson received an A.B. from Dartmouth College with highest distinction in art history (1977), and A.M. (1978) and PhD. (1981) degrees in art history from Harvard University. 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 decorated with the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic) in 2011.

OTHER AFFILIATIONS

Anderson serves on the NewCities Foundation board, the advisory board of the National Center for Arts Research, the Advisory Board of Columbia University Press and is Chairman Emeritus of the Global Cultural Districts Network. He is a Senior Advisor at Ennead Lab, the research arm of Ennead Architects, and a Distinguished Consulting Scholar in the Office of the Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

He is a consultant to the Office of the Prime Minister of Barbados. led by the Hon. Mia Amor Mottley, Q.C., M.P., as part of a consortium of LMI Group International and Esaiyo, Inc., to digitize tens of millions of pages of documents attesting to the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people, and advise on the creation of a Heritage District on Barbados to contain the Archives and related functions.

He lives in Manhattan and has a son, Chase, and a daughter, Devon.