Anna Hiddleston-Galloni

Co-director of the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City Museum

March-April 2023

Portrait d'Anna Hiddleston-Galloni

© Anna Hiddleston-Galloni

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“Museums cannot shy away from emotion in the face of intellect, seek debate without respect. Knowledge must go hand in hand with accessibility, beauty with diversity, art with society.”
Who?
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With a Master’s degree in Art History, I have worked on the curation of modern and contemporary art exhibitions, in both private galleries and public institutions over the past twenty-five years. Currently Associate Curator at the Modern Art Department of the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou, I have recently been given the responsibility of the Curatorial Program for the new museum we will be opening in Jersey City.  

 

What will this museum look like, and how will it differ from the Parisian institution? Our prime concern is for it to be in touch with the people who live there whilst keeping hold of the Centre Pompidou’s core identity, as a place of thoughtful, multi-disciplinary exhibition and debate.  

 

Although I have been continually interested in how to reach new audiences, it is now more than ever an important aspect of my mission. How to develop community engagement? How to draw in people unfamiliar with museums and give them the sense that they belong there? One of the recurring challenges of curating exhibitions is to find a balance between scholarly content and historical research with a more accessible approach for visitors.  

 

I recently co-curated the Georgia O’Keeffe show which opened at the Centre Pompidou in September 2021, just as the world was opening up after lockdown. People flocked to the show, in part because the pandemic had prevented them from doing so for so long, and in part because the show not only presented O’Keeffe’s works, but also talked about her life, her person. We included portraits of her by famous photographers and a comprehensive biography peppered with quotes to allow her voice to resonate. In this way, art history was interwoven with O’Keeffe’s own story. The paintings revealed not only the radicality of her artistic innovation, but also her experience of life. The visitors’ response to the show demonstrated just how much the pandemic has increased our need to reach out, and how museums need to be places of human experience, where ideas and emotions can be shared. 

 

Anna Hiddleston-Galloni graduated with a Masters Degree in Art History from the Courtauld Institute, London in 1995. She began working the same year at the Centre Pompidou as Research Assistant, collaborating on exhibitions about Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and Nicolas de Staël among others. She also worked in parallel as Arts Consultant at the Caisse des Dépôts Arts Patronage Program for seven years, before joining the Department of Contemporary Art at the Musée national d’Art moderne-Centre Pompidou in 2004 where she worked on exhibitions such as “Danser sa vie” and “Air de Paris”. Currently Associate Curator at the Department of Modern Art since 2013, she has co-curated the exhibitions “Matisse in his Time”, “Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman. Face to Face”, “Francis Bacon. Books and Paintings” and more recently “Georgia O’Keeffe. A Retrospective.” 

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In partnership with

centre pompidou
Centre Pompidou

Since 1977, the Centre Pompidou has presented a rich programme at the crossroads between different art forms and audiences. Its iconic building is home to one of the world's largest modern and contemporary art collections, in addition to exhibitions, symposiums, festivals, shows, projections, and workshops for young audiences, making it an unparalleled cultural institution, deeply rooted in the cultural fabric of Paris and open to the world and to new innovation. 

 

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