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Christine Kondoleon is a renowned scholar and curator, who has drawn abundant praise for her imaginative and bold reinstallation of the Greek collection at the largest private museum in the United States. The three galleries that have opened to date are devoted to works from ancient Greece . One room is devoted to “Homer and the Epics,” another to “Dionysus and the Symposium,” and the last to “Theater and Performance.”
Kondoleon has mounted exhbitions on the city of Antioch and on the goddess Aphrodite. Before going to the Museum of Fine Arts in 2001, she was curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Worcester Art Museum. Before that she was chair of the art department at Williams College. Kondoleon received her Master’s Degree from Yale University and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.
“This is the largest private museum in America; it may be one of the largest private museums in the world. I’m extremely fortunate to work with probably one of the greatest collections in the world of classical art. We have about one million visitors a year. It’s very important to engage them directly with these works of art which they have no history of context with”, says Kondoleon about her work.
Her goals are to make the important, deep collections accessible, and to introduce ancient society in a comprehensible and interesting way to the public today.
“I like the aspect of discovery…I didn’t quite choose this particular career. I really was trained and focused on being an academic. I went on being a professor of Art History at Williams College but for family reasons I moved to Boston and I left all that for what we call a “soft money” job, a job that is only supported by a grant. For five and a half years I was a curator at the Worcester Art Museum and I did an exhibition on the ancient city of Antiochia. It was a successful exhibition that traveled round the States and made my name.”, says Kondoleon about her professional journey.
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