This can be a first for Albany’s New York State Museum (NYSM)—charting its personal historical past by appointing its first girl director, Jennifer Saunders, to guide the practically 200-year-old establishment.
NYSM is the oldest and largest public museum within the US. Its broad vary of collections span science, historical past, archaeology and anthropology, overflowing with greater than 20 million artefacts, from a billion years in the past to at present.
A digital press convention was held on Monday 14 July to announce Saunders’s appointment. “I am excited to work with the employees and have the ability to utilise the superb assortment on the museum to showcase all of the tales that New York has to supply,” Saunders mentioned on the occasion. She famous that she can be trying ahead to discovering extra about her family historical past in New York courting again to the Revolutionary Struggle.
Saunders will take the reins at NYSM in September, following 14 years as director of the Washington State Historic Society and Washington State Historical past Museum in Tacoma. “I am definitely conscious that what we contemplate deep historical past in Washington is comparatively younger on the East Coast,” Saunders mentioned. “I believe that the strategy to historical past is constant, irrespective of the place you might be—or at the very least the strategy that I embrace, and that is selling an entire historical past.”
Throughout her tenure in Washington State, Saunders doubled her organisation’s working funds, expanded companies and launched public programming akin to Black Historical past in Washington—a multiplatform initiative with sources for educators, a digital app and a everlasting monument to the early Black Pacific Northwest settler George Bush on the Washington State Capitol in Olympia.
New York State Museum, Albany Picture: Matt Wade through Wikimedia Commons
Earlier in her profession, Saunders served as govt director of the Harbor Historical past Museum in Gig Harbor, Washington. Saunders has educational levels in politics and economics from the College of Oxford, the place she was a Marshall Scholar, and Wellesley School in Massachusetts.
“I believe we knocked it out of the park,” Michael Mastroianni, the performing director of NYSM, mentioned of Saunders’s appointment. Mastroianni has been filling in since former director Mark Schaming retired final summer time after 37 years on the helm.
Whereas it’s too early to speak specifics concerning the museum’s future, a glance again on the previous decade reveals an ongoing wrestle between the state training division and New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s workplace on renovation plans and funding.
At Monday’s press convention, Saunders mentioned she had “no trepidation” about collaborating with state entities. “It is very clear that the commissioner, the governor, the legislature and the neighborhood care deeply about this establishment and wish to see it succeed,” she mentioned, “and that is what excites me concerning the place: to come back in and work collaboratively with all the stakeholders to craft that imaginative and prescient, after which to execute on that imaginative and prescient.”
