Visual Arts

For more than 40 years, the Meadows Museum has been a hidden gem, buried deep in the leafy confines of the Southern Methodist University campus. But its director, Dr. Mark Roglán, aims to make the Meadows one of Dallas' crown jewels.

ELIZABETH M. CLAFFEY/DMN

Dr. Mark Roglán, director of SMU's Meadows Museum, perches amid its 19th Century Gallery.

Dr. Roglán says he wants to provide Meadows' visitors with an intimate, intense cultural experience – to make the museum a cultural destination for everyone who is hungry for art.

To turn his vision into reality, he plans to continue adding new Spanish art to a collection that many think is already outstanding. And he aims to bring new exhibitions to the Meadows and to conduct symposia that will draw international attention.

"Remember, our collection has already brought a king to Dallas," Dr. Roglán says, referring to the 2001 visit by the Spanish king, Juan Carlos, to celebrate the Meadows' move from a gloomy, cramped corner in the Meadows School of the Arts to its new building.

With an impressive building and a Meadows Foundation grant of $25 million, Dr. Roglán sees a bright future, and others agree.

"Because Mark is at the museum, we have confidence that the money will be used wisely," says Linda Evans, chief executive of the Meadows Foundation.

"At first, some people were concerned about Mark's youth – he is 36 – but that hasn't been a problem."

As part of its educational mission, the Meadows will host a symposium in conjunction with an exhibition that opens Friday. The show will feature American works from the 1850s to the 1950s, and the symposium is designed to explain the connections between Spanish and American art by using Spanish paintings in the Meadows collection.

John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla exhibited together and were good friends, as were Alexander Calder and Joan Miró, Dr. Roglán says. Works by Sargent and Calder will be part of the show. He especially wants American art experts who normally wouldn't frequent a Spanish museum to come to learn about the collection.

"Sometimes you see shows with big-name artists, but they only have the artist's second-rate pieces," says Kevin Vogel, owner of the Valley House Gallery and an occasional adviser who has donated paintings to the Meadows. "Mark's show has big-name artists with their A and A+ paintings."

Dr. Roglán attributes his love of art to his upbringing. When he was a child, his parents took him to the opera, concerts and art museums in Madrid, Paris and London. His Spanish father, a journalist, spent part of his career in Albuquerque, N.M., working for the Voice of America, and later became the news director of a major Spanish television network in Madrid.

His American mother taught school, including a stint at a U.S. air base just outside Madrid. He attended a Catholic school in Madrid that taught in Spanish and French. When he was 14, he spent a year at a school in Toulouse, France. At home, his mother always spoke to him in English. Every other summer, he visited her relatives in the U.S.

In Europe, Dr. Roglán grew up with history and art all around him. That taught him the importance of studying art in its historical context. To understand a portrait of King Charles V of Spain, he says, you have to understand what was going on in the 1500s.

He followed that rule, and received undergraduate degrees in history and art history from the Autonomous University of Madrid. He chose those subjects because "in science, most everything is measurable, but in the humanities it is not, and that's what makes it interesting," he says. Later, he earned a master's and doctorate from the AUM.

Dr. Roglán began thinking about becoming a museum professional. He took a year away from his doctoral studies to study museum management at Tufts University. "I went to Tufts to test the waters," he says. "There, I had museum curators, conservators and directors as teachers. That experience defined my career path."

He worked at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, where he met his future wife, Kathleen, who was employed at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. After they married, he returned to Spain to finish his doctorate and to work at Madrid's Prado Museum. They now have a daughter, and a picture of an angelic baby girl is Dr. Roglán's screen saver.

When a curator position opened at the Meadows, Dr. Roglán applied.

"We were interested in Mark because his doctoral dissertation was about Spanish paintings in the U.S., and he already knew all the works in the Meadows collection," says Dr. Carole Brandt, who was dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at the time. "He was one of the few people in the world who had that knowledge."

His wife, Kathleen, adds: "Mark was excited about coming to the Meadows because it gives him the chance to teach. He loves teaching, and he brings the art alive by taking students into the galleries to see it."

When he got the Meadows job in 2001, he asked Dr. Brandt whether she thought he could adapt to Texas. "Mark, you'll do fine, but your wife – being from Boston – that's a different story," she joked.

He did get along well, and in 2006, he became the museum's director.

Dr. Roglán is always on the lookout for works to add to a Spanish art collection that many think is among the world's finest. "We don't want just any piece," he says. "We want only the very top quality by a particular artist." Last April, a painting by Martin Rico came up for auction, and the museum bought it. "When we saw it, we knew it was one of his masterpieces."

Dr. Steven Nash, former director the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, says that Dr. Roglán's Spanish contacts have helped him acquire new paintings. "He has a lot of savvy, and he has stayed in contact with the family of Joaquin Sorolla, and he gets a heads-up when Sorolla's work comes on the market."

To round out the Meadows' mission, Dr. Roglán has brought in exhibitions that attracted 70,000 visitors during the last fiscal year, more than double the attendance of two years before.

One reason for the increase was a Cristobal Balenciaga show earlier this year. The great Spanish designer's clothes attracted visitors from Texas, and it drew widespread attention elsewhere, including articles in The New Yorker and the Kuwait Times.

Dr. Roglán stays in close contact with the leaders of Dallas' Hispanic community. He has worked with the Mexican Consulate for a Mayan textile exhibition and for a Diego Rivera show in the spring of 2009. That show will feature Rivera's cubist portraits, painted when he was a student in Paris from 1913 to 1917. Most of the pieces will come from Mexico.

Next spring, the Meadows will exhibit late-medieval Spanish paintings, featuring altar panels by Fernando Gallego. To support that, Dr. Roglán lined up assistance from the University of Arizona Museum of Art, the Getty Research Center and the Prado.

And after Dr. Roglán contacted the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Meadows and the Kimbell began cooperating on scholarly research for the late-medieval show. "Mark is dedicated to the idea of collaboration," Dr. Nash says.

The museum has also launched a community outreach program. It has hired an education director who is developing activities for children and adults. To attract Hispanics, the Meadows is writing bilingual labels and catalogs and conducting tours in Spanish.

Dr. Roglán's international experience is a great addition to the Meadows School of the Arts, says Dr. Jose Bowen, the dean.

"We want SMU to be more international," he says. "And the museum brings Hispanic culture to the campus. We are thinking about offering a Ph.D. in art history in order to make the museum's Spanish art available to our students."

Dr. Roglán's background allows him to work easily in two cultures. "He is completely bilingual and bicultural," says Dr. Luis Martin, a fellow Spaniard who frequently lectures on Hispanic culture.

"He has good contacts in Latin America and Spain. He went to the Royal Court in Madrid and convinced them to loan their tapestries to the Meadows for what turned out to be a blockbuster show."

"Passionate" is a word Dr. Roglán's associates frequently use to describe him. "He's not only passionate about art," Dr. Martin says.

"He's also passionate about opening people's minds to the beauty of art. When he takes visitors though the museum, his enthusiasm for the works flows like Niagara Falls."

"What drives me," Dr. Roglán says, "is that I love art. It has the power to reflect the best that we humans are able to produce and the beauty of who we are."

Jon Bauman is a Dallas freelance writer.

Plan your life

"Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s" opens Friday and continues through Feb. 24 at the Meadows Museum, 5900 Bishop Blvd., Southern Methodist University campus. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. $8; free after 5 p.m. Thursdays. 214-768-2516, www.meadowsmuseum dallas.org.