Works in Art
Alumni pursue full-time creative endeavors
By Ruth S. Intress
Ann Bigley Robertson remembers Saturdays spent with her grandmother gazing at delicate porcelain and stunning portraits in a marble-halled museum.
Years later, on a high school field trip through the same gallery, Robertson recalls a transformative moment as she stood before one of Monet’s wistful cathedrals. When her art teacher drew the students closer, they could see, just on the surface, how the brilliant Impressionist laid heavy strokes and splotches of paint across the canvas.
“Listening to the teacher talk about Monet,” Robertson ’74 said, “I was hooked.” Thanks to a competing college’s lack of dormitory space, Robertson brought her passion for art and literature to Mary Washington.
“I never knew there was such a thing as an art history major. I thought I wanted to be a history major and special education teacher,” said Robertson. “But Mary Washington’s art history department had wonderful, creative professors. You were encouraged and pushed to your potential.”
Robertson continues to strive as she deals daily with great masterpieces. She is an exhibition officer at the National Gallery of Art, the museum of her girlhood tours.
With a mathematician’s exactitude, Robertson acts partly as diplomat, partly as linguist and partly as trouble-shooter in negotiating behind-the-scenes details of securing loans of great art collections from around the world.
Both academic and experiential breadth are vital, said Robertson, noting she found both at Mary Washington, where she was a dual major in art history and English. “Exhibition organization is not something you study; it’s something you explore and learn about through experience.”
Such experience, nurtured in her adolescent jobs as a florist shop girl, “mannequin” model and special education tutor, also has taught Robertson patience. That virtue serves her well when she coordinates challenging exhibitions ranging from Vermeer paintings to ancient Cambodian sculptures.
As one of the National Gallery’s senior exhibition officers, Robertson administers six or more special showings a year and coordinates the myriad details and contracts that must be in place before priceless works go on view.