Contemporary Museums: Challenges and Responses
On Saturday, September 29th, and Saturday, November 10th, Carleton University’s School for Studies in Art and Culture will be hosting English-language presentations and discussions with senior figures from four of France’s most important museums.
These events are held in English, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., in 435 St Patrick’s Building.
All interested Carleton faculty, staff and students are welcome.
Museums around the world are in a state of dynamic flux, with some institutions expanding their buildings in particularly interesting ways, while others are establishing branches in other cities in an attempt to make their collections and activities more broadly available. This is part of the huge museum boom and concomitant rethinking of museums in general that has been going on for the last two decades.
On September 29th we will be hosting Xavier Dectot (director of the new branch of the Louvre Museum in the city of Lens), and Laurent Salome (scientific director of the Grand Palais in Paris – an institution that is undergoing a major conversion project). On November 10th, we will be hosting Laurent Le Bon (director of the Pompidou Centre’s new branch museum in Metz) and Jean de Loisy (president of the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris).
Xavier Dectot has been the director of the Louvre-Lens Museum since 2011 and is a specialist in the history of medieval sculpture. Trained at the Ecole des Chartes, where he obtained a diploma as an archivist-palaeographer, he was appointed heritage curator in 1997. From 1998 to 2000, he was a scientific member of Casa Velasquez (in Madrid) and in 2001 defended his doctoral thesis in art history. In 2001, he was appointed curator at the Cluny Museum (the National Museum of the Middle Ages) in Paris. He has curated a number of temporary exhibitions, notably: Catalogne romane, in 2004, Paris, Ville rayonnante and D’or et de feu, l’art en Slovaquie à la fin du Moyen Âge.
Laurent Salomé is a specialist in 17th-century French drawings. He was assistant director of the Museum of Grenoble from 1990 to 1995, where he participated in the construction of the new museum, organized the move of the collections and designed the new gallery for exhibiting drawings. He served as director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes from 1995 to 2001, and then for ten years as director of the museums of Rouen, in northern France. He has organized some 80 exhibitions and monographs, including “La Mythologie de l’Ouest dans l’art américain 1820-1920”; “Une ville pour l’impressionnisme: Monet, Pissarro et Gauguin à Rouen”. Since April 2011 he has been the scientific director of the Réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais. He has made it his mission to give the new establishment, created in 2011 by the merger of the Réunion des musées nationaux and the Grand Palais, a new ambition and to strengthen its role as a natural partner for other museums.
Laurent Le Bon was from 2000 to 2010, a curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou. He curated a number of exhibitions, notably Dada, and Jeff Koons Versailles at the Palace of Versailles. Since 2008 he has been the director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, inaugurated in May 2010, which opened with a critically acclaimed exhibition that he himself curated (Chefs-d’œuvre ?). In 2012, he organized the 1917 exhibition that is being shown at the Centre Pompidou-Metz until 24 September. He will also be the artistic director of Nuit Blanche, which will take place in Paris on 6 October 2012.
Jean de Loisy was appointed president of the Palais de Tokyo in June 2011. He is a freelance curator, and has held a variety of positions in a wide range of cultural institutions. From 1986 to 1988 he was responsible for introducing contemporary creative work into historic monuments at the Ministry of Culture. From 1994 to 1997 he was a curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and was an art critic for the program Peinture fraîche on France Culture from 1996 to 2006. In the context of his activities as an exhibition curator, Jean de Loisy has taken part in a great many international events including the Venice Biennial in 1993 and 2011, and the Gwan-Giu Biennial in 1995. He has also organized a variety of monographic exhibitions, and more recently was the curator for Monumenta 2011 / Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Grand Palais, in Paris.