Faculty and Alumni Spotlights: Fall Conferences
Pat Villeneuve to Retire
Professor Pat Villeneuve, Director of the Arts Administration program and faculty member of the Museum Education and Visitor-Centered Curation program will retire in January 2025 after 22 years at Florida State University. In addition to mentoring many doctoral and master’s students over the years, she also proposed the museum education and visitor-centered curation program, which started in 2014. Pat has received many awards during her tenure at FSU, notably the National Art Education Association’s National Art Museum Educator of the Year (2009) and a Fulbright Fellowship (2021) to Flemish Belgium, where she was co-hosted by FARO, the Flemish governmental agency for culture and heritage, and KU Leuven. Pat worked with a collaborative she established that included FARO and the Flemish museums M Leuven; MAS, Antwerp; and SMAK (Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art), Ghent. Through this collaboration, a number of European authors contributed to the book she co-edited with Ann Rowson Love, Dimensions of Curation: Considering Competing Values for Intentional Exhibition Practices, published by the American Alliance of Museums and Rowman & Littlefield in 2023. Pat and Ann have collaborated on many research projects and publications over the years including another co-edited book, Visitor-Centered Exhibitions and Edu-Curation in Art Museums (2017).
During her busy teaching, scholarship, and administrative duties, Pat maintained an active artistic practice creating artworks she refers to as deconstructed quilts. Currently her work Winter Weather Log is included in the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) virtual gallery exhibition and in the American Quilter’s Society QuiltWeek in Lancaster, PA in September. Her work, Bauhaus Fringe, was selected for the juried exhibition New Quilts from an Old Favorite exhibition at the National Quilt Museum and will travel to additional venues through January 2026. Pat looks forward to full-time art practice and splitting her time among Tucson, Arizona, Door County, Wisconsin, and travel abroad. We will miss her tremendously, but we wish her all the best in her retirement and look forward to seeing more of her beautiful art quilts in the coming years.
Fall 2024 has been a busy time for the museum education and visitor-centered curation program faculty and alumni presenting at regional and international conferences. Ann Rowson Love and Pat Villeneuve spoke on a colloquium panel at the International Conference of the Inclusive Museum in Vienna, Austria in September. Their panel, “Story, Voice, and Polyvocality: Understanding Intersectionality through Qualitative Research in Art and Cultural Museums” featured contributors to Love and Randolph’s new book, An Introductory Guide to Qualitative Research in Art Museums (2024). Alumnus, Jay Boda Associate Director of Academics, Innovation, and Research at The Ringling (PhD, 2020) also spoke at the conference, “Getting to Know Our Audience: Developing and Using Audience Data.”
Along with her co-author, Deborah Randolph, Ann presented a book chat about An Introductory Guide to Qualitative Research in Art Museums at the Art Education Research Institute at Cambridge University in September. The conference also featured department colleagues Jeff Broome and Christen Sperry GarcÍa, current doctoral students, and FSU alumni.
In October, Ann attended the Southeastern Museums Conference in Baton Rouge, LA. In her role as chair of the Curator’s Committee she hosted the CurCom Annual Luncheon. She also got to spend some time with alumnus Sarah Graves (PhD, 2019), Manager of Visitor Engagement at Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. Sarah co-presented “On the Front Line: The Future of Museums is Visitor Services” with colleagues from the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston and the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Sarah is on the host committee for next year’s SEMC in Montgomery, AL.
