Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 8, 2002

Volume 30, Number 21

Amy Meyers

Alumna is new director of
Yale Center for British Art

Amy Meyers, curator of American Art at the Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has been named director of the Yale Center for British Art, President Richard C. Levin has announced.

Meyers, who will also hold the post of professor of the history of art, will serve as director for a term of five years, beginning Sept. 1.

"It gives me the greatest pleasure to announce the appointment of Amy Meyers," said Levin. "She has distinguished herself as an outstanding and imaginative leader in the field of research and a singularly adept administrator at some of the nation's prominent museums, galleries and research centers. Her experience developing collections in all media and her involvement with the building of collaborative programs, not only regionally, but also nationally and internationally, auger well for her tenure here."

Her Yale appointment marks a homecoming for Meyers. After receiving her B.A. from the University of Chicago, she did the graduate work for her 1985 Ph.D. in American studies at Yale, where professors Howard Lamar, Jules Prown and Bryan Wolf were advisers for her dissertation on Anglo-American and English naturalists.

Since then Meyers has spent most of her time at research institutes, first as a graduate fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, then at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery. For the past 13 years, she has been at the Huntington, where she is responsible for running the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery of American Art, a museum that also serves as a centerpiece for one of the most active research programs in the history of Anglo-American culture. She has helped to build up collections of art from the colonial period through the 20th century, and she has been instrumental in formulating programs on the history of American art and material culture.

In concert with her colleagues, Meyers has encouraged cross-institutional dialogue about the history of trans-Atlantic culture that has extended to the faculty and student body of the California Institute of Technology, where she is an adjunct faculty member, as well as to other area colleges, universities, museums and research centers that have ongoing relationships with the Huntington. She was the Huntington's representative in the Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, for which she served as vice chair 1995-2000.

The new director of Yale's British Art Center is a leading expert on naturalist illustrators, and her scholarship has focused on British interpreters of America. She has written about various aspects of naturalist art in numerous book chapters and scholarly publications, and she was coeditor (with Margaret Pritchard) of "Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision" and (with Jennifer Watts) of the exhibit catalogues "A Life's Work: Edward Weston's Guggenheim Collection" and the forthcoming "Nexus of Exchange: Philadelphia and the Visual Culture of Natural History, 1740-1840."

Meyers also has a lifelong interest in photography, and with Alan Trachtenberg, the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale, edited "Classic Essays on Photography." She will be joined in New Haven by her husband, Jack Meyers, who also is a Yale alumnus (1972 B.A.), and their daughter, Rachel. Jack Meyers is the deputy director of the Getty Grant Program at the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The search committee included Yale faculty members and administrators Linda Peterson, Richard Benson, Jock Reynolds, Tim Barringer, Ned Cooke, Diana Kleiner and Jules Prown. In making the announcement of the appointment, Levin also acknowledged with deep appreciation the help the committee had received from Constance Clement, acting director of the Yale Center for British Art, and Malcolm Warner, curator of paintings and sculpture at the center.

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