Museum Series No. 3 Sèvres Ceramic Museum x Yale Center for British Art

Villa Albertine and the Center for Curatorial Leadership are thrilled to host an exceptional transatlantic conversation on the future of museums between Charlotte Vignon, Director of the Sèvres National Museum of Ceramic, and Courtney J. Martin, Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art.

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

The event will be streamed live on Villa Albertine’s YouTube Channel, starting at 6 pm EST.

The Speakers

Charlotte Vignon, Director of the Sèvres National Museum of Ceramic

Since February 2020, Charlotte Vignon is Director of the French National Museum of Ceramic located at Sèvres, just outside Paris (Musée national de céramique de Sèvres). Previously, she was Curator of Decorative Arts at The Frick Collection in New York for more than 10 years. Beforehand, she has held three highly regarded fellowships at American museums: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Frick Collection, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow. Vignon organized several exhibitions at The Frick Collection: Exuberant Grotesques: Renaissance Maiolica from the Fontana Workshop (2009), Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette (2011), White Gold: Highlights from the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain (2011), Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court (2012), Precision and Splendor: Clocks and Watches at The Frick Collection (2013), Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court (2016), Fired by Passion: Masterpieces of Du Paquier Porcelains from the Sullivan Collection (2017), Masterpieces of French Faience: Selections from the Sidney R. Knafel Collection (2018), and Elective Affinities: Edmund de Waal at The Frick Collection (2019). In addition to writing the catalogues for most of these exhibitions as well as numerous articles and essays on European decorative arts, including 16th- to 19th-century ceramics, tapestries, furniture, and architecture, as well as the history of the art market and collecting in the United States, Vignon is also the author of Duveen Brothers and the Market for Decorative Arts, 1880−1940 as well as Gouthière’s Candelabras, with Edmund de Waal, both published in 2019.

Courtney J. Martin, Director of the Yale Center for British Art

Courtney J. Martin is the Paul Mellon director of the Yale Center for British Art. Previously, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Dia Art Foundation, taught at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley and worked at the Ford Foundation. In 2012, Martin curated Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip… Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–1978 at Tate Britain. At Dia she curated an exhibition of the painter Robert Ryman and oversaw exhibitions of works by Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Blinky Palermo, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier, and Andy Warhol. She co-edited Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award) and edited Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016). In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She received a doctorate from Yale University. She sits on the boards of the Chinati Foundation, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, Hauser & Wirth Institute and the Henry Moore Foundation.

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 Spring Dialogues are made possible thanks to the generous support of Cartier and the Firends of Villa Albertine, notably Béatrice Stern, Sana Sabbagh and Denise Littlefield Sobel.