March 18, 2005

DR. MARK A. ROGLÁN NAMED INTERIM DIRECTOR
OF THE MEADOWS MUSEUM

DALLAS (SMU) -- Dr. Mark A. Roglán has been appointed interim director of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, effective May 1, 2005. Dr. Roglán succeeds Dr. Edmund Pillsbury, who has served as Meadows Museum director since July 2003 and has announced plans to undertake new challenges in the public sector beginning in May.

Dr. Roglán joined the Meadows Museum as interim curator and adjunct assistant professor of art history in October 2001. He became curator of collections in January 2002, senior curator in June 2004, and assistant professor in the Division of Art History at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts in January 2005.

At the museum, he initiated and led to fruition several important projects, including a long-term loan of ten important Medieval and Early-Renaissance Spanish paintings and sculptures from the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which are presently on display. Dr. Roglán has curated several distinguished exhibitions in the past three years, including "Goya's Mastery in Prints," "In the Meadows: Recent Sculpture, Drawings and Prints of James Surls," and "Titans of Modern Mexico," and he played crucial roles in the planning and development of other important exhibitions, including "Spanish Master Drawings from Dutch Collections (1500-1900)," "Greek Vase Painting: Treasures of the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid," and "Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life (1521-1821)." He is currently curating a major international loan exhibition to open in December, "The Rebirth of Spanish Art: Cosmopolitan Painting from Fortuny to Picasso," while also directing and coordinating a major study on "The Paintings from the Altarpiece of the Cathedral in Ciudad Rodrigo (Spain)," a group of 27 panels by the 15th-century Hispano-Flemish artist, Fernando Gallego, that will be on display at the Meadows Museum in the near future.

"Dr. Roglán has done a stellar job at the Meadows Museum for the past three years and we are pleased he has accepted the post of interim director," said Carole Brandt, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts. "We are confident he will continue the museum's momentum as we undertake a national search for a new director."

Dr. Roglán said, "This is an exciting time to be at the Meadows Museum. I'm honored to be named the interim director, and I look forward to helping the museum begin to achieve some of the goals set forth in the newly completed strategic plan."

Before coming to the Meadows Museum, Dr. Roglán worked as a curatorial fellow and a research associate in the 19th-century painting and sculpture department of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, from January 1999 to September 2001. There he collaborated on numerous projects for 19th-century art exhibitions, wrote for diverse exhibition catalogues and helped to prepare a raisonné catalogue of the Prado's entire collection of 19th-century paintings and sculptures -- more than 4,100 works in all. He also worked on several scholarly publications as a researcher of the 19th-century painting collection of the Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid and collaborated on the forthcoming raisonné catalogue on the works of the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla for the Foundation for the Preservation of the History of Hispanic Art in Spain.

Before his tenure at the Prado Museum, Dr. Roglán served as a drawings department assistant with the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. During the previous academic year, he studied at Tufts University through a Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Scholarship. Among other fellowships and honors, Dr. Roglán was awarded an Erasmus European Union Scholarship for a year-long study at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and a Fundación Argentaria Fellowship for the study of 16th-century art at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

A native of Madrid, Dr. Roglán received master's degrees in both world history and art history and a doctorate in 19th- and 20th-century art from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. His dissertation, 19th-Century Spanish Paintings in Public Collections in the United States, featured a number of works at the Meadows Museum.

The Meadows Museum, a division of SMU's Meadows School of the Arts, houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain, with works dating from the 10th to the 20th century. It includes masterpieces by some of the world's greatest painters: El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo, Goya, Miró, and Picasso.

04154-nr-3/18/2005