Museum Series No. 10 – Examining global museum expansion in the 21st century: Musée du Louvre x Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership are thrilled to host an exceptional transatlantic conversation on the future of museums between Dr. Souraya Noujaim, Director of the Islamic Arts Department of the Musée du Louvre and Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation.

This discussion will be moderated by Elizabeth W. Easton, Director and Co-Founder of CCL.

The event, which is open to the public, will take place at the Villa Albertine headquarters on December 4th and will be streamed live on Villa Albertine’s YouTube Channel, starting at 6 pm EST.

The Speakers

Souraya Noujaim, Director of the Department of Islamic Arts of the Musée du Louvre

Dr. Souraya Noujaim was appointed Director of the Department of Islamic Arts of the Musée du Louvre and responsible for the large national heritage department of Islamic arts in June 2023.

She was previously the Scientific Director in charge of the conservation and collections of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum, whose development she orchestrated. Since 2018, she has led the scientific team and oversees the museum’s cultural and scientific program, the collection development strategy, the programming of temporary exhibitions in co-production with several French and international museums, training policy related to conservation occupations, as well as scientific aspects of international partnership programs. She defined the museum’s research policy and oversaw the creation of its laboratory.

Internationally recognized expert in the arts of Islam, Souraya Noujaim holds a PhD from the University of Paris X in the history and archaeology of the medieval worlds, graduate of the Ecole du Louvre and a master’s degree in art history from the University of Paris IV.  She has notably worked as a scientific collaborator at the Musée du Louvre in the field of Islamic arts, as a mission officer at the British Museum in Arabic and numismatic epigraphy, and as scientific director in charge of the permanent course Fifth – 15th centuries. She teaches regularly at the Louvre School and has been a lecturer for several years at the Arab World Institute. She is co-curator of several exhibitions at the Louvre Abu Dhabi and author of publications, articles and catalogues on the arts of Islam.

Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation

Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D. is an award-winning curator, Asia scholar and author focusing on art, culture and institutional global strategy. She is Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, where she has led the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative since its founding in 2006. From 2018 to 2023, she served as Senior Curator and Director, Curatorial Affairs, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, where she led the foundational curatorial program, collection growth, and research initiatives shaping the future museum.

Munroe has worked on over forty exhibitions and is recognized for her pioneering scholarship on artists Cai Guo Qiang, Daido Moriyama, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan, Mu Xin, and Yoko Ono, among others, and for bringing such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, Japanese otaku culture, and Chinese conceptual art to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which The New York Times named as Top 10 exhibitions of 2017 and Artnews named as Top 25 most influential shows of the decade. Recent publications include Shilpa Gupta (Phaidon), The Shape of Time: Korean Art since 1989 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and James Lee Byars (Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan). She received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.

Elizabeth W. Easton, Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Curatorial Leadership

Elizabeth Easton is the Director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL), a non-profit organization she co-founded with Agnes Gund in 2007 to train museum curators in the fundamentals of management and leadership. Now in its sixteenth year and with almost 400 alumni around the world, CCL continues to provide curators with the tools necessary to assume and succeed in leadership positions.

She previously served as the first elected president of the Association for Art Museum Curators from 2003-2006, and as chair of the Department of European Paintings and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum from 1999-2007. Easton earned her Ph.D. at Yale University, writing her dissertation on Edouard Vuillard’s interiors of the 1890s.

She is the recipient of the Wilbur Cross Medal—the highest honor accorded to alumni of Yale University’s Graduate School—and in 2008 was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government. She is a trustee of MASS MoCA and is also on the Visiting Committee of the Department of Paintings Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

About the Villa Albertine Museum Series

The Villa Albertine Museum Series, launched by Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership, is a new platform to explore the future of museums on both sides of the Atlantic. It will bring together 24 women leaders from premier cultural institutions in France and the US for monthly conversations in 2023 on how museums must reinvent themselves to meet the challenges of the present.

The Villa Albertine Museum Series Fall Dialogues are made possible thanks to the generous support of the Friends of Villa Albertine, notably Agnes Gund, Marie-Josée Kravis, Denise Littlefield Sober, Sana Sabbagh and Béatrice Stern.