New director hired for International Folk Art Museum
Villela is art historian, expert on pre-Columbian and Latin American art
The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs announced Wednesday that it has appointed Khristaan D. Villela, an art historian and expert of pre-Columbian and Latin American art, to be the new director of the Museum of International Folk Art on Museum Hill.
Villela, 47, succeeds Marsha Bol, who retired last fall, and Charlene Cerny, who served as an adviser to the museum during the national search for a permanent director.
Villela will be leading a museum considered the crown jewel in the New Mexico system, an institution he said is known around the world as a “leader in presenting global arts and culture” and the “only place in Santa Fe where people can learn about other cultures outside of New Mexico and the kinds of arts they make.”
He cited upcoming exhibitions on tramp art, objects often attributed to itinerants and hobos, and traditional Scandinavian dress as examples.
Villela said Wednesday that one of the things he is interested in pursuing as director is making connections to peer institutions elsewhere, such as the Popular Art Museum in Mexico City, which was founded in 2006, and the children’s museum in Mexico City, called the Papalote Museo del Niño.
The Folk Art Museum has a strong staff and an international reputation, he said, and he looks forward to “assessing what we do and looking for opportunities to grow that take advantage of our collections.”
The “breadth” of the museum’s collections make the institution “unique in the world,” Villela said.
Laurel Seth, executive director of the International Folk Art Foundation, said Villela will bring both international experience and local knowledge to the job, as well as contacts she believes will “foster some good collaborations.”
Villela, who will begin his job Monday, has a doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. While he has never run a museum before, he has experience bringing exhibitions from conception to execution. He has curated exhibits at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Miho Museum in Japan and the New Mexico History Museum. Most recently, he was a consulting curator for Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Villela was the founding director of the Thaw Art History Center at the College of Santa Fe, with faculty, a library and collections devoted to the arts of the Americas, ancient to contemporary. And he comes to the museum from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where he was a professor of art history and a scholar in residence.
Villela frequently writes for publications including New Mexico Magazine, El Palacio, ARTNews and the online Adobe Airstream, and he has a column in The Santa Fe New Mexican’s arts magazine, Pasatiempo. He is working on a book on the contributions of Mexican artist, collector and curator Miguel Covarrubias to pre-Columbian studies in the U.S. and Mexico in the mid-20th century.
Villela said planning for expansion of the Folk Art Museum needs to be on the table, although “probably not in the next week.” Every museum in Santa Fe is out of space, he said, noting the state’s budget concerns and the fact that the New Mexico Museum of Art is already planning an off-site expansion.