5 African-American women hold senior, leadership positions at VMFA

Five women of color holding key positions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts are, from left, Paula Saylor-Robins, director of audience development and community engagement; Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; Jan Hatchette, deputy director for communications; Kimberly J. Wilson, deputy director for human resources, volunteers and community service; and Hazel Duncan, director of finance and accounting for the VMFA Foundation.

In 2015, only 4 percent of the curators, conservators, educators and leadership staff at art museums in the United States were African-American, according to a recent survey by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Recent hires at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts are bucking that trend. Five African-American women now occupy leadership and senior level positions at the publicly supported museum on the Boulevard in Richmond.

They are:

• Hazel Duncan, who was named director of finance and accounting of the VMFA Foundation in January;

• Jan Hatchette, who became deputy director for communications in April;

• Valerie Cassel Oliver, who began earlier this month as the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art;

• Kimberly J. Wilson, who was hired as deputy director for human resources, volunteers and community service in December 2015; and

• Paula Saylor-Robinson, who, since 2015, has been director of audience development and community engagement.

The wave of hiring African-Americans in these key positions began with the hiring of Ms. Wilson in 2015, according to the director of the VMFA.

“We are the ninth largest comprehensive art museum in the United States, and we doubled our staff size when we opened in 2010,” said museum Director Alex Nyerges. “But we did not increase our human …

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