Museum Series No. 9 – Building a network of museums in the 21st century: Paris Musées x Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden

Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership are thrilled to host an exceptional transatlantic conversation on the future of museums between Anne-Sophie de Gasquet, Director of Paris Musées and Melissa Chiu, Director of the Hirschhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden.

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

The event, which is open to public, will take place at the Villa Albertine headquarters on November 15th and will be streamed live on Villa Albertine’s YouTube Channel, starting at 6 pm EST.

The Speakers

Anne-Sophie de Gasquet, Director of Paris Musées

Anne-Sophie de Gasquet is the General Director of Paris Musées since April 2021.

Founded in 2013, Paris Musées is the public institution managing the City of Paris 14 museums and historical sites. Paris Musées’ mission is to preserve, enhance and share the diversity and richness of the City of Paris museums’ collections, with an emphasis on broadening its audiences and keeping the permanent collections free and open to the public.

Anne-Sophie de Gasquet was previously the Production Director at the Centre Pompidou, after serving for several French cultural institutions (musée d’Art moderne de Paris, Palais de Tokyo). She also worked at the City of Paris (at the cabinet of the Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë, as well as the cabinet of the Cultural delegate and with the International Relations delegation), and at the ministry of Foreign Affairs (at the cabinet of Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius, after working for the French cultural services in Los Angeles and at the French Institut).

Melissa Chiu, Director of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden

Melissa Chiu is Director of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, the national museum of modern art at the Smithsonian Institution.

A hallmark of her nine-year tenure has been groundbreaking exhibitions such as Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors in 2017, which established a new understanding and appreciation for the artist’s infinity mirrored rooms through a national exhibition tour. She has commissioned artists to create commissions for the museum’s unique architecture such as Mark Bradford’s longest-spanning painting on Civil War history and for the re-design of the museum’s Sculpture Garden selected artist/architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. During her tenure, the museum doubled its attendance to 1 million annual visitors, making it one of the most visited modern art museums in the country. The museum’s technology initiative, the award-winning Hirshhorn Eye (hi) was created as an image recognition video guide, adopted by other Smithsonian Institution museums, and now has its second life as a video guide activating the museum’s new collection book.

Chiu holds a Ph.D. in art history and has published and edited books on Asian contemporary art.

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.