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Metropolitan Museum of Art announces Julie Jones to Become Curator Emeritus

Thomas P. Campbell, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced that Julie Jones, an eminent curator and scholar of the art of the ancient Americas, will retire at the end of March 2013, following 21 years as head of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, including the past six years as Andrall E. Pearson Curator in Charge. Her tenure at the Museum began in 1975. She will become Curator Emeritus as of April 1.

Julie Jones began her career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975 as a Curator of Precolumbian art. She was promoted to Curator and Acting Department Head in 1990, and became Curator in Charge of the department in 1992.

Prior to her years at the Metropolitan Museum, she worked at New York’s Museum of Primitive Art. Founded in 1954, it was the first museum in the United States formed specifically to exhibit the traditional arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Julie Jones began work as a graduate intern in 1960, then became an assistant curator in 1965, and a curator in 1974. In 1969, the entire collection of the Museum of Primitive Art was offered as a gift to the Metropolitan Museum by its founder, Nelson A. Rockefeller; Julie Jones was one of the Museum of Primitive Art’s curators to subsequently transition to the Metropolitan, where a separate department for the care, study, and exhibition of the works was being established. At the Metropolitan Museum, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was designed and built to provide galleries for the collection of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The new wing opened to the public in February 1982 and received more than 800,000 visitors during its first year.

At the Metropolitan Museum, Julie Jones organized exhibitions that highlighted various aspects of the ancient American world. The first of these was Desert Valley: Early Works from Ica, Peru (1983) that featured the gifts from an early supporter of Precolumbian art at the Museum, Nathan Cummings. Other exhibitions with Precolumbian themes followed: The Art of Precolumbian Gold: The Jan Mitchell Collection (1985); Houses for the Hereafter, Funerary Temples of Guerrero, Mexico (1987); Andean Four-Cornered Hats (1990); Loma Negra, a Peruvian Lord’s Tomb (1992), which displayed an important group of Moche metal objects in gold, silver, and copper, representing an area of great strength within the Museum’s Precolumbian holdings; Ancient Peruvian Mantles (1995); Jade in Ancient Costa Rica (1999); and Heritage of Power: Ancient Sculpture from West Mexico—The Andrall E. Pearson Family Collection (2004), which led to gifts from the Pearson family that enriched the Museum’s collection of West Mexican ceramics. The most recent of the Precolumbian shows was in 2011, The Andean Tunic. Julie Jones also contributed to Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (1990), a landmark exhibition that included important works from the beginnings of the art history of Mexico, the fullest regional art history of the Americas. The exhibition raised the profile of Mexican art in the United States significantly.

Over the years that Julie Jones was in charge of the department, she oversaw the renovation of a number of Rockefeller Wing galleries, working with her team of curators and the Museum’s installation designers. The 1993 renovation and reinstallation of the Jan Mitchell Treasury for Precolumbian Works of Art in Gold integrated the 1991 gift of Precolumbian gold objects by Jan Mitchell into the existing treasury. In 2007, an extensive renovation of the Oceanic galleries was completed under the curatorial guidance of Associate Curator Eric Kjellgren. That renovation project encompassed the adjacent Native North American Gallery, which was expanded due to the Museum’s increased activity in collecting and exhibiting American Indian art. That interest began with the opening of the loan exhibition Native Paths: American Indian Art from the Charles and Valerie Diker Collection (1998), which was also overseen by Julie Jones. It was followed by The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art in 2003. The Coe Collection was a bequest to the Metropolitan in 2011.

For the past 25 years, Julie Jones has served on the Editorial Board of the Metropolitan Museum Journal, which publishes original research into works of art in the Museum’s collections. – www.metmuseum.org

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