One of Matthew Robb’s favorite childhood activities was counting the number of dogs in paintings.
As a child, Robb traveled with his family around the world visiting collections like the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. To entertain himself during his visits, he created an elaborate rating system for museums based on the number of dogs he found in their art.
Robb translated his love for museums into his work as a curator, beginning as an assistant at Princeton University Art Museum in 1999. On June 13, he assumed his new position as the chief curator at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Robb’s research focuses on studying Native American and ancient American cultural relics. Most recently, he curated the Arts of the Americas at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where he created a database of hundreds of stone masks from the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan.
The Daily Bruin’s Emily McCormick spoke with Robb about his early interest in ancient art, responsibilities as a curator and vision for the Fowler Museum.
Daily Bruin: What made you want to focus your career on art of the Americas?
Matthew Robb: I’ve always been attracted to Mexico, probably since I was a little kid. I grew up in Texas, so my family would go there for trips. My parents were also very interested in the arts, since my dad was a museum curator and my mom was an art history professor. They would drag my brother and me around to museums pretty early on, and I guess something about the South American pyramids stuck with me, and oil on canvas didn’t quite sink in the same way.
DB: What do the responsibilities of a curator consist of?
MR: At any museums, there are a number of different roles that different people play. The conservators are responsible for the physical care of the objects. The registrars and collections managers are responsible for the day-to-day logistics of the objects, like where they are, how they’re housed and where they go for exhibitions.
The curators are really responsible for the scholarly understanding of where an object comes from, when it was made and what you can do with it (in an exhibition).
DB: Are you more focused on public outreach of the art, or is your work more about research within the museum?
MR: Some days you can really spend a lot of time tracking down more information about one particular object, looking for the history of that object and its current collection. … That kind of work can all be very solitary.
But then, you’re also talking about the exhibition to your colleagues and with the people inside the museum … (and) with donors, trying to hopefully get them to support it in one way or another. Then when the exhibition goes up of course, you’re wanting to make sure different people – visitors, scholars, what have you – get to find out more about the show from your perspective. A curator’s job can really run the gamut.
DB: What initially made you interested in working as a curator?
MR: I had this great professor when I was an undergraduate and he was a curator at a university museum too, and his name was Gillett Griffin. He taught at Princeton for many years, and he was a really big influence on me. … His work was what always attracted me to work in museums, that mix of doing both research and education. He had this interest in the ancient Americas and in ancient Mexico in particular, and I really just followed his footsteps.
DB: What are some of the biggest differences between working at a university museum like UCLA versus an art institution like the de Young in San Francisco?
MR: At the larger institutions that I’ve worked in before, it wasn’t necessarily as much about teaching undergraduates or graduate students, it was about teaching docents and visitors and people like that.
But really, I started working first in a university museum, and that was what really attracted me to work at the Fowler. It’s the opportunity to work directly with students and faculty and see what kinds of projects they’re working on and see if they could translate into an exhibition. … The Fowler has a lot of close contact with art history and world arts and cultures, and those will be the core relationships that I want to maintain and expand on.