The board of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) announced its selection of Thomas Campbell, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as its new director, effective 1 November 2018. He succeeds Max Hollein, who recently replaced him at the Met.
Information from the FAMSF, 30 October 2018
Mr. Campbell served as Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2009 to 2017, having joined the Met as a curator in 1995. During his tenure at the Met, he led a revitalization and modernization achieved through award-winning exhibitions and publications, major capital projects, and historic donations of works of art. Attendance grew by more than 50 percent to a record seven million visitors a year, with audiences that are now more diverse than ever before.
Most recently, from November 2017 through October 2018, he was a Getty/Rothschild Fellow with residencies at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and at Waddesdon Manor in the UK, undertaking independent study of the impact of global changes on museums and cultural life in general.
Over his thirty-year career, Mr. Campbell has dedicated his life to the preservation, study and promotion of art as a gateway to human understanding. A distinguished art historian who was educated at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute, University of London, he joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995 as an assistant curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts and supervising curator of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center. As curator, he conceived and organized the acclaimed exhibitions Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002) and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (New York, 2007; Madrid, 2008). The 2002 exhibition was named “Exhibition of the Year” by Apollo Magazine and its catalogue won the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award (College Art Association) for distinguished exhibition catalogue in the history of art (2003). His book, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court, a reappraisal of the art and patronage of the era, was published in 2007.