William Pittman Andrews has been named director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art/University of New Orleans. Andrews will start on Jan. 2, 2012.
The 41-year-old native of Starkville, Miss., has been the director of the University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses since 2009, where he was also an adjunct assistant professor of art at the university. While he was director, Andrews worked to establish a vital museum community in the town of Oxford, Miss., well known for its vibrant culture of literary and visual arts.
“We are thrilled to have found someone with William’s enormous energy and vision, as well as his deep knowledge of Southern art,” says Julia Reed, chair of the Ogden Museum’s board of trustees. “We are looking forward to his leading the Museum into the next phase by expanding the museum’s already excellent programming, as well as its resources.”
Andrews’ guiding principle has been to follow ideas that place the museum at the center of a participatory public culture, to offer, in his words, “the museum as a place where people come to do things and to interact with each other, not just to look at things.”
At the Ogden Museum, Andrews is looking forward to leading the institution into the early stretch of its second decade. “The Ogden Museum of Southern Art should be mentioned in the same conversations with museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” says Andrews. “Both of these institutions, with exhibitions like The Quilts of Gee's Bend and William Eggleston: Democratic Camera - Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, display an interest in how art of the American South fits into the broad category of American Art.”
Prior to joining the University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses, Andrews was at Mississippi State University, where he was the project manager of the Visual Arts Center (2007-2009). He was a founding member, board of directors at the Starkville (Mississippi) Area Arts Council (1996-2006); gallery director, College of Art, Architecture, Art and Design, Mississippi State University (2003-2009); founder, Mississippi Museum Fund/Mississippi Gulf Coast Art Rescue (2005); adjunct instructor, department of art, Mississippi State University (1996-2003); and owner, Main Street Gallery in Starkville (1994-2000).
Andrews graduated from Mississippi State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Sculpture in 1993, and received a Masters of Fine Arts from Mississippi State University in Electronic Visualization. As an artist, Andrews has had a number of solo exhibitions at museums, such as the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Miss. and the E.E. Bass Cultural Center in Greenville, Miss., as well as group exhibitions in Atlanta, Ga., Washington, D.C., Boston, Mass., Brooklyn, N.Y., and St. Louis, Mo.
The Ogden Museum of Southern Art/University of New Orleans is home to the largest and most comprehensive collection of Southern art in the world, and includes the Center for Southern Craft and Design. The Museum was established as an affiliate of University of New Orleans in 1994. It opened in a temporary gallery on Julia Street in 1999, then moved to its current location, Stephen Goldring Hall, in New Orleans’s Warehouse Arts District, in 2003. The Museum’s initial collection included 1,200 pieces that businessman and philanthropist Roger H. Ogden donated to the Museum, which today, through donations by artists and collectors, has grown to more than 4,000 pieces of art.