UCLA’S FOWLER MUSEUM APPOINTS NEW CHIEF CURATOR
Matthew Robb has been named the new chief curator at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, starting June 13. Robb previously served as curator of the arts of the Americas at the de Young, one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Marla Berns, the Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum, said of the appointment: “I am thrilled that someone of Matthew’s strong scholarly background and excellent museum and curatorial experience will be joining us . . . Given the Fowler’s strong collections of ancient and historical arts from Mesoamerica as well as our stellar holdings of material from the Andean world, Matthew will bring fresh insights and expertise to future research and exhibition projects.”
At the de Young, Robb’s research focused on the permanent collection’s murals from the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan. In 2013, he was instrumental in bringing the Weisel Family Collection of Native American Art to the collections. A specialist in the art and archaeology of ancient Mesoamerica, he compiled a database of more than five hundred examples of stone masks associated with Teotihuacan during his time as a scholar at the Getty Research Institute in the spring of 2015. Prior to joining the de Young, Robb was associate curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where he began as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow in 2007. He has also previously served as a visiting curator at the Walters Art Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum.
Robb received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1994, and he earned a master’s degree in 1999 from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in 2007 from Yale University, where his thesis on the apartment compounds of Teotihuacan was awarded the Frances Blanshard Fellowship Fund Prize.
