Teitelbaum, 68, became director in August 2015. He will leave his post a little more than a year from now, in August 2025.
“For the first time since I was 24, I’m looking into the future without specific plans, and I can say that feels pretty liberating,” he said in a phone interview with the Globe. “But there are still things here that I need to do, and it really is my responsibility, and my commitment, to ensure that the MFA moves forward from here in the most thoughtful and responsible way it can.”
Teitelbaum joined the MFA after a 22-year stint at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, first as its chief curator and then as director, a position he held for 17 years prior to coming here.
Teitelbaum will leave the MFA with a string of accomplishments that both honor and reckon with the museum’s storied history, as well as help position it for the future. In recent years, the MFA has renovated and reopened permanent gallery spaces for cornerstone collections such as Pyramid-Age Egyptian Art, The Art of Japan, and its expansive Greek and Roman galleries, all of which stand among the best in the world.
Teitelbaum’s tenure also spanned the COVID-19 pandemic, a cataclysmic disruption that shuttered cultural institutions all over the world and cut off vital revenue streams for more than a year. Along with the pandemic came a nationwide reckoning with the country’s legacies of enslavement and colonialism — both of which are embedded in the origins of any museum in this country, the MFA included. Under Teitelbaum, the MFA steered into the challenge with programming that directly addressed some of the hardest truths about the country’s — and its own — history.
“It was unprecedented, to have that range of challenges all at the same time,” he said. “I would hope that people would look back and say we led with a values based approach, and audience-centered approach based on fairness and empathetic leadership, at a time when it was really necessary to do that.”
In 2021, the museum opened the Center for Netherlandish Art, the culmination of one of its most significant recent gifts: In 2017, Teitelbaum shepherded the donation of the Van Otterloo and Weatherbie collections, 114 works of art by such Dutch golden-age masters as Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens that instantly made the museum a global hub of scholarship for the northern renaissance.
The gift also included funding to build a permanent research center meant to broadly probe the history, culture, and society of the era and its echoes in the present day. When it opened, the new galleries signaled a wider institutional priority: Alongside Netherlandish masterpieces were deep contextual readings about Dutch colonialism and the vast wealth it generated through exploitation and enslavement.
The new study center fell in line with an ethos that evolved throughout Teitelbaum’s tenure. Probing reinstallations of the museum’s permanent collections laid out historic shortcomings not only within the MFA’s own walls but in the museum world more broadly: “Women Take the Floor,” an 18-month initiative begun in 2019 to both put on view the MFA’s holdings of art by women and to point out its historic shortcomings in collecting it; a reinstallation of its permanent Americas collection in 2022, integrating the often overlooked realms of Indigenous, Folk, and Latin American art with its traditional holdings by high-profile American artists like Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe; and an ongoing rotation in the museum’s American historical galleries, where signature works by artists such as John Singleton Copley and Thomas Sully are now routinely paired with contemporary art by Black and Indigenous artists as a counterweight to the mainstream narrative of American freedom.
Marc S. Plonskier, president and chair-elect of the museum’s board of trustees, said in a statement that Teitelbaum “encouraged an audience-centered culture within curatorial practice — deepening visitor engagement with art and the Museum — and created innovative programs and experiences that link our rich, historical collection to the times in which we live.”
For Teitelbaum, deep societal upheaval outside museum walls made the work within more urgent. “These are challenging times, but my God, people need museums more than they ever have,” he said. “If you think about museums as places of conversation, of community, of recognition, of partnerships that can lead to new ideas . . . that sustains me, and I think that’s sustained so many of us, because we felt we were working with purpose.”
Teitelbaum, however, puts nothing in past tense. “The MFA’s best days are ahead of it,” he said. “The challenge for me, over the next year, is to make sure I create the launch pad to make that possible.”
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
