Mari Lyn Salvador - Museum Career

Museum Career

She served as chief curator at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico from 1978 until becoming director at the San Diego Museum of Man in 2005. In 2009, Dr. Salvador was appointed directorship of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Salvador advocates bringing community elders to museums as scholars and has worked with many such elders in doing research for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Her focus on gender and indigenous peoples is a widening of the San Diego Museum of Man’s purpose beyond its literal name, indicative of the more general trend in museums today toward plurality. She also served as the president of the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), from 2003-2005. She maintains a position on the board, reflecting her own and the council’s mission to advance anthropology within the context of museums. In the January 2008 issue of San Diego Magazine she was chosen as one of the "50 People to Watch in 2008.

Dr. Salvador’s commitment to studying ethnoaesthetics and understanding art in the context for which it was created has been a touchstone for her work. Not only are these objects a pleasure to view, recognizing the conventions to which these works of art adhere and the context in which they were created tells us much about the people who made them. Understanding many levels of art as a cohesive unit—the beauty, symbolism, conventions, and the social elements, both within and without Kuna culture, Azorean culture, and New Mexican Hispanic culture—have brought a broader, more culturally enriched notion of art to the museum-going public. Dr. Salvador has been instrumental in connecting art to the people who created it, a part of the movement that allows the public to better appreciate art as more than a single-faceted visual or auditory phenomenon, but as a reflection of the society that created it.