Jump to content

Anne Breckenridge Barrett

Anne was the Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the MCA.

A white woman with fair skin and long blond hair wears glasses and crosses her arms.
Photo: Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago

About


Annie Barrett is trained as a lawyer with a master’s degree in collection management and arts administration. At the MCA, she supervises the registrars, the exhibition production department (which includes the preparators), and the rights and images department, ensuring the care of the museum’s collection and managing complicated exhibitions projects.

One perk of her job is traveling personally with works in the MCA collection to ensure their safe transport and installation. On a recent trip to the Pompidou, Paris, with our Wilfredo Lam, she shared the plane ride with some racehorses and their vets.

For the retrospective of Doris Salcedo, which traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Annie and her team worked closely with curators, the artist, and the artist's assistants to install 78 tables of growing grass, an entire gallery of concrete furniture, a room of sensitive organic materials set into the walls, and many objects wrapped in human hair, bones, and other extremely fragile materials.

Annie is active in the national community of collections and exhibitions professionals and recently contributed an article to the American Bar Association's quarterly publication from the Museums and The Arts Law Committee on “Social Media, Audience Engagement, and Mitigating Risk in Museums.”