A search committee, chaired by Bezucha, formed last fall after the former director of the museum resigned. The committee consisted of College faculty with expertise in art, as well as the retired director of the Smith College museum and the Williams College museum director. Barker was chosen out of 80 applicants.
"She really believes in the teaching mission of college art museums," Bezucha said of Barker. "The finalists had a meal with student docents and had a chance to talk to them … one student said 'I just loved her. In one hour I learned so much from her.'"
Barker has 10 years of experience in various jobs, but spent the majority of her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she was a curator in the department of drawings and prints. The Met holds about three million works of art, approximately half of which are in that department.
She began working at the Met during her first year of graduate school and advanced from Curatorial Assistant to Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints at the unusually young age of 32.
Not entirely fulfilled with the environment at Met, Barker accepted a position as director of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University, where she could interact more closely with guests. As Barker had essentially been assured a lifelong position at the Met, her career move to the world of academic museums was a serious decision.
"The Met in many respects resembled a research laboratory, in which the curatorial staff undertook ground-breaking research in highly specialized areas of academic interest, and presented the results in catalogues and exhibitions," explained Barker. "But we had relatively few opportunities to share our discoveries with the public face-to-face. While I had a close connection to the art objects under my care, I was removed from the audiences that attended my exhibitions."
Barker presided over the Picker Art Gallery for two years, where students engaged in intensive, hands-on internships. She plans to restructure the docents program at the College along similar lines to offer more student-friendly hours, and provide docents with greater responsibilities and a clearer understanding of how museums work.
Barker also hopes to find innovative ways to share more of the Mead's collection with the community. Ten percent of the Mead's 16,000 works are on display at any given time, and the exhibits are changed twice a year. Barker would like to display more works on the museum's Web site and possibly create a podcast of audio tours.
Prior to Colgate, Barker was appointed a fellow in the department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Since 2003, she has been a guest curator at the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a B.A. in the history of art from Yale University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in art history from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she also earned a Certificate in curatorial studies.
Barker has recently worked on an international exhibition of British Enlightenment painter Joseph Wright of Derby which will open in Liverpool this November and then at Yale Center for British Art in the spring.
"The opportunity to come to Amherst was one I couldn't refuse," said Barker. "The Mead's permanent collection is one of the strongest in the country in my own areas of academic interest, British and American art of 18th and 19th centuries. Having worked at some of the best museums in the world (the Met and the British Museum), I know good quality art, and can honestly say that parts of the Mead's collection are world-class. Amherst College has some extraordinary works of art."
The Mead was closed for construction until Sept. 4. Barker said that the museum has since stopped segregating American art and instead integrated works of various origins that were part of a similar movement. This change, Barker feels, has created some "unexpected relationships," and she hopes it will encourage visitors to look at works that they have already seen in fresh ways.
"I hope we'll be able to strengthen our ties to all of the different communities that we belong to-students, staff, regional visitors, faculty, and visitors from across the commonwealth and the northeast," said Barker. "I'd like to make our very fine collection of 16,000 works of art much better known and better used so that every Amherst College student, by the time she or he graduates, will have had at least one really important-possibly life-changing-encounter with an original work of art here."