Greeks Gone West: Meet Christine Kondoleon

Greeks Gone West: Meet Christine Kondoleon, curator of Greek  and Roman Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Christine Kondoleon is a renowned scholar and curator, who has drawn abundant praise for her imaginative and bold reinstallation of the Greek collection at the largest private museum in the United States.  The three galleries that have opened to date are devoted to works from ancient Greece .  One room is devoted to “Homer and the Epics,” another to “Dionysus and the Symposium,” and  the last to “Theater and Performance.”

Kondoleon has mounted exhbitions on the city of Antioch and on the goddess Aphrodite.

Before going to the MFA in 2001, she was curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Worcester Art Museum.  Before that she was chair of the art department at Williams College.  Kondoleon received her Master’s Degree from Yale University and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.

In her own words…

On her work:

"This is the largest private museum in America; it may be one of the largest private museums in the world. I’m extremely fortunate to work with probably one of the greatest collections in the world of classical art. We have about one million visitors a year.  It’s very important to engage them directly with these works of art which they have no history of context with."

On story telling:

"In these galleries we have a storyboard with iPad touch screens. We tell the story of the Trojan War , and we tell it only from our work of art. When we did an exhibition on the Greek Athlete when the Games were in Athens in 2004…we were the only museum in America that did any exhibition related to the ancient Greek athletic tradition in fact, New Balance running shoes supported us, which was great because it’s a local company run by a Greek-American."

On her goals:

"I try to make these important, deep collections accessible, and to introduce ancient society in a comprehensible and interesting way to the public today. Sometimes we take a risk to do something for reasons that aren’t necessarily clear and end up doing something more creative, or challenging, and maybe more impactful."