18 December 2009
On 2 December 2009 the Queen officially opened the new Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which had gone public the previous month after a £61 million redevelopment project, much of it paid for by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The museum now boasts 100% more exhibition space, with 39 new galleries (left) and a state-of-the-art conservation studio.
On the same day the Victoria &?Albert Museum in London opened its new £31.75 million Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, which hold more than 1800 masterpieces including Leonardo’s notebooks and a group of Donatello sculptures. At the same time, the V&A and the Iran Heritage Foundation have announced that Dr Moya Carey will become the Iran Heritage Foundation Curator, Iran Collections, in the museum’s Asian Department. This new curatorial role is one of a series of positions created as part of IHF’s new programme of developing strategic partnerships with major academic organisations. The IHF has also named its new Executive Director, Dr Ladan Akbarnia, who had previously worked at the Brooklyn Museum as Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art.
In November 2009 the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York announced that following a generous gift of $10 million from the Istanbul-based Vehbi Koç Foundation there will be two new galleries for Ottoman Art called the Koç Family Galleries opening in 2011. They will be part of the museum's galleries for the art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and later South Asia, displaying works created within the borders of the Ottoman Empire between the early 14th and early 20th centuries.
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