Museum Staff

Ginny Barrett

Ginny Barrett arrived with a fresh plan for the five museums, and the place has moved faster since. She takes what she calls the long view - considerably longer than most. During her doctoral training she worked as a guest curator at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where she learned that ordinary objects, honestly labeled, outdraw any spectacle.

Like Hildebrand, she trained in the scholarship of Fernand Braudel and the Annales School, and the longue durée is her working tempo: the historical method that watches the slow, constant structural forces — geography, climate, and economy across centuries — rather than the fast surface of political events. When she says the long view, it is no figure of speech.

Under her direction the drawers opened to teachers, the docent corps was recruited from every century, and acquisition turned bold - she has a practiced eye and no sentimentality about where a thing has been. Ask about her career before museums and she will smile, pour you something, and change the subject.