Williams Museum Appoints Mellon Curatorial Fellow
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This position is funded by a $1.27 million challenge grant that WCMA received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in January 2009 to strengthen and expand the museum’s current Mellon Academic Program.
This fellowship enables the museum to bring a promising young scholar to campus with scholarly expertise in areas of art history underrepresented on the current museum staff, such as African art, African-American, Asian-American, and Latino/a art, Asian art, Islamic art, and Native American art. By bringing a broader global perspective to the museum’s collection and programs, each fellow will greatly expand the museum’s ability to present, interpret, acquire, and teach with art across time and cultures. The fellowship is also intended as a professional bridge for those who have recently completed graduate degrees and who plan to enter careers in art museums or classroom-based art history. The fellowship seeks to encourage diversity within the museum field.
Originally from Miami, Florida, Ms. Scruggs is completing her Ph.D. at Harvard University, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before Harvard, Ms. Scruggs attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and received her B.A. in the History of Art. Ms. Scruggs’s interest has been in African American art. Her dissertation focuses on the work of African American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington and art of the 19th-century “back to Africa” movement in the United States.
The Mellon Curatorial Fellowship is a three-year appointment. In her first year, Ms. Scruggs will provide research on objects in the museum’s collection and identify areas of the collection on which she would like to focus her research. Ms. Scruggs will work closely with Mellon Academic Coordinator Elizabeth Gallerani to develop relationships with faculty members across the disciplines at Williams. In her second and third year, Ms. Scruggs will conceive of an exhibition with assistance from the director and her faculty mentor and produce an associated scholarly publication.
“We are thrilled to add an additional curatorial voice to our team with the appointment of Dalila,” explains Class of 1956 Director Lisa Corrin. “It is very important that we continue to grow and expand our teaching and study of the collection to reflect the increasing diversity of the Williams curriculum. Thanks to this endowment and the new Mellon Curatorial Fellow, the museum can continue to reach out to an ever broader array of students and communities.”
The Mellon Academic Program includes a number of initiatives that support teaching with the museum’s collection of over 13,000 objects. These initiatives include: the Rose Study Gallery, a dedicated museum classroom where artwork from the collection can be accessed and viewed for teaching; research, which is conducted on objects in the collection and added to the museum’s database; exhibitions developed with faculty to support course curriculum at Williams; and an innovative exhibition and publication series called “Labeltalk,” which presents works from the museum’s collection alongside written responses by Williams faculty from different disciplines and multiple perspectives.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has supported the Mellon Academic Program since 1992 when WCMA was awarded its first Mellon grant “to help the museum enhance the educational role of its collection and programs.” An additional grant was awarded in 1995 to continue teaching initiatives, research on the collection, faculty involvement in exhibitions and programs, and student involvement in the program. At this time, the Mellon Curatorial Associate position was created with the goal of making faculty interaction with the museum “indispensable to the curriculum.” Since then, an endowment continues to serve Williams’ faculty and students and enables WCMA to deepen its teaching mission.
