George Lucas’s Museum of Narrative Art Hires the Met’s Education Department Whiz as Its New Director

After an eight-month search, Los Angeles’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, has named
Sandra
Jackson-Dumont as its new director and chief executive
officer. She will leave her current role as head of education
and public programs at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of
Art,

Co-founded by filmmaker and Star Wars creator
George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, the $1
billion art museum is currently under construction, with the
majority of the work expected to be completed by late 2021.

“Education is at the core of our mission, so it’s fitting that
the director of the Lucas Museum be a deeply experienced museum
educator,” Hobson said in a statement. “Sandra has
more than two decades of experience in the field, and we believe
she is the leader who will help bring our vision of creating an
inspiring and accessible museum to life.”

The Lucas Museum will showcase the couple’s 100,000-item
collection, which includes paintings, sculpture, photography,
illustration, comic art, and Hollywood artifacts and memorabilia.
Among the highlights
are works by Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, and NC Wyeth, as
well as objects from the Star Wars franchise, including
the original Darth Vader mask.

Jackson-Dumont joined the Met in 2014, after eight years as the
deputy director for education and public programs and adjunct
curator in modern and contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum.
She has also previously worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem and
the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“So much of the work that I’ve done either as a curator or as a
programmer or as an administrator has been about, how do we make
museums relevant and engaging and mean something to people’s
everyday lives?” Jackson-Dumont told the Los Angeles Times.
“I think that the objects that are in this amazing collection speak
to opportunities to connect to visual storytelling in ways that
make people really have discussions. So I’m excited about
that.”

Jackson-Dumont succeeds Don Bacigalupi, the institution’s
founding president, who joined the museum in 2017 after serving as
president and executive director of the Crystal Bridges Museum of
American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. He stepped down suddenly in
February, and was initially supposed to continue on in a special
advisor role, but is not affiliated with the museum at this
time.

After considering sites in
San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Lucas
Museum initially announced plans to make its home in Chicago. But that
arrangement fell through due to opposition from the local
community, and Lucas selected Los
Angeles as the final site in early 2017.

With that turmoil in the rear-view mirror, construction on the
futuristic Ma Yansong-designed
building from Beijing’s MAD
Architects began in Exposition Park in March 2018.

When Jackson-Dumont begins her new job in January she will join
curators Erin M. Curtis and Ryan Linkof and curatorial assistant
Michelle Prestholt. Jackson-Dumon will ultimately lead a staff
of 230.

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Met’s Education Department Whiz as Its New Director appeared
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