The Museum of High quality Arts, Boston (MFA) has picked its new director, Pierre Terjanian. He’ll step as much as the function on 1 July, having served as chief of curatorial affairs and conservation since January 2024. Terjanian succeeds outgoing director Matthew Teitelbaum, who’s retiring this summer time after ten years main the MFA—the 83rd-most-visited artwork museum on the planet and ninth-most-visited within the US, in line with The Artwork Newspaper’s most up-to-date attendance-figure survey.
“It’s actually an honour to go the management of this nice establishment to Pierre—an inspiring colleague who believes strongly within the function of artwork and museums, and the significance of tradition and neighborhood,” Teitelbaum stated in a press release. “His dedication to the curatorial discipline, and throughout museum features, is deeply knowledgeable by his unwavering dedication to inquiry, technique and dealing with others to deal with the important points dealing with public establishments at present.”
Terjanian—a local of Strasbourg, France—has labored for nearly three many years at US museums, together with as a curator of arms and armour first on the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork after which at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork.
Throughout his ten years on the Met, Terjanian organised exhibitions just like the formidable 2019 who The Final Knight: The Artwork, Armour and Ambition of Maximilian I, with 180 objects borrowed from establishments worldwide. He additionally co-chaired the Met’s reopening taskforce through the Covid-19 pandemic, raised $100m in funds and artistic endeavors for the museum and secured a significant present of 91 objects of European arms and armour from the collector Ronald S. Lauder. (Lauder, an inheritor to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune and the founding father of New York’s Neue Galerie, is allegedly the one who satisfied US President Donald Trump to attempt to purchase Greenland.)
Terjanian received the 2024 Marica Vilcek Prize in Artwork Historical past and, earlier this yr, was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et de Lettres by the French authorities.
“We reside in a time when cultural establishments have a chief alternative to display the optimistic distinction they’ll make within the lives of people—and in society,” Terjanian stated in a press release. “I’m excited to tackle this work, and I imagine even higher affect will come within the type of partnerships in and past Boston.”
