Director’s Message

Dear Friends,

The fiscal year 2022 (July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2022) was an inspiring time of reopening and resetting, a moment for the Museum to respect the past and reach for the future. We welcomed our public to bold new installations, increased our gallery capacity and hours for visitors, strengthened staffing and programs, reached out to broader audiences, and resumed a robust slate of exhibitions. This report underlines the past year’s challenges and achievements advanced through our staff’s dedicated advocacy of the Museum’s mission to bring people and art together.

Our curators tested new approaches to meaningful internal and external collaboration, locally and internationally. In May 2022, an expanded curatorial team presented “Philip Guston Now” in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art after months of deep reexamination guided by many voices. The fuller understanding of Guston focused on interpreting his work through the lens of the artist’s lifelong commitment to raising difficult, even fundamentally unanswerable questions.

“Philip Guston Now” acknowledged both the context in which his paintings were made and their meaning for audiences today. For 50 years, Guston’s works—particularly his depictions of cartoonish Klansmen and his powerful late works that reference the Holocaust, family, and mortality—have challenged and inspired generations of artists and evoked varied responses. Decades later, his paintings remain open to the complexity of each viewer’s lived experience: this exhibition presented his work as a conduit for direct conversations about reckoning with the inequities of the world and the role of the artist in an unjust society.

The exhibition incorporated a broad range of perspectives with a diversified approach to interpretation, numerous historical references, and artists’ perspectives, including several of Guston’s former Boston University students—Carol Barsha, Grant Drumheller, Robert Freeman, and Barbara Baum—who shared their vivid memories of Guston as a teacher and mentor. The New York Times called the exhibition “absorbing every step of the way,” and one visitor commented that with additional context and space, “you’ve opened room for sensitivity and discussion.” New audiences came to Guston and his work, engaging in dialogue with us from many viewpoints.

Newly installed galleries present the stories of objects and artwork in the MFA’s collection to wider audiences. Along with spectacular new spaces for Dutch and Flemish works and for ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine art, we debuted two additional spaces for visitors to engage, learn, and experience great works of art. Showcasing works across a range of media, including devotional art and objects for the home, our galleries for Renaissance art demonstrate how art permeated everyday life in Renaissance Italy and underscore the echoes from antiquity to the Renaissance to today. Silver objects carrying physical evidence of their creation shine in the French Salon, highlighted in gallery media that uncovers stories behind the reconstructed period room and the makers of the precious objects within. The narrative threads in these galleries expand opportunities for visitors to make their own connections and discoveries.

Connecting young people with art and artists is a crucial part of our mission and our future. This year we fully funded our MFA Pathways internship program, one of the largest paid internship programs in the nation, delivering on our promise to be accessible and open to audiences and learners of all ages. Conceived in 2021, the MFA Pathways program provides paid internships across the Museum, with more than 60 students having participated over the course of its first year. Welcoming a diverse cohort of students into learning-based placements across the Museum’s spaces and teams, MFA Pathways provides an hourly wage, peer networking, and mentors, as well as support through a professional development program. The skills and opportunities gained at the MFA represent all aspects of our work here: curatorial, education, conservation, development, accounting, hospitality services, security systems, and much more. A broader cohort of students more fully reflects our community within an actively evolving field of museum practice. And our interns challenge us to think harder about why we do what we do and who it is for, passionately advocating for honest, intentional action on sustainability, cultural heritage, obligation, and mission.

“Stories Artists Tell: Art of the Americas, the 20th century,” which opened in early summer 2022 and is on view through May 2025, represents a dynamic, meaningful interpretation of our 20th-century art from the Americas in the suite of galleries on the third level of the American wing. Each room tells a story, exploring themes and eras from Native perspectives on the Southwest to the ways artists confronted the traumas of World War II, from the knotty politics of Latin American realism through the vibrant links between art, design, and jazz, to the imaginative life of folk artists, in a spectacular showcase of 20th-century art, with icons from the Museum’s collection appearing alongside works by underrecognized artists. These narratives winding across time and place create new scenes and stories rarely told before at the MFA.

Central to this display is “Touching Roots: Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas,” with works by Black artists who engaged with African artistic traditions, aesthetic expressions, and sacred spaces. Among the artists featured are Loïs Maillou Jones and John Wilson, who were both born in Boston and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, as well as contemporary makers. As the Boston Globe noted, “‘Touching Roots’ helps reveal a parallel history of both 20th-century American art and of the museum itself. It knits together an aesthetic across oceans and eras, connecting the Black diaspora to its African roots and acknowledging its struggle to make itself whole.”

The year ended with our free community day, Juneteenth. Visitors engaged in joyous and thoughtful conversation with the works in these galleries and many other spaces throughout the Museum. Seeing neighbors, families, and Bostonians young and old all able to meet together in our galleries once again was a fitting end to a challenging year—a rewarding reminder to work always toward connection and reimagining, evolving and reaching out, and creating our future.

Matthew Teitelbaum
Ann and Graham Gund Director