Siddhartha V. Shah, New Director of the Mead Art Museum, Looks to Sink Roots in the Valley
Daily Hampshire Gazette – “A sense of community is really important to me,” says Shah, who will assume leadership of the Mead on Nov. 15. A local newspaper article focuses on the previous places where Shah has lived and worked, and on his impending arrival at Amherst.
The article, written by Steve Pfarrer, notes that Shah’s parents are Indian immigrants to the United States and that he has “has lived, worked and traveled in a wide range of places over the years: Chicago, Baltimore and San Francisco; New York and London; India, France and Belgium; and most recently, New England.” Since 2018, Shah has worked at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.
“Shah said part of the appeal of coming to Amherst stems from the significant effort the college has made in the past two decades to bring students of color, and especially students of lesser economic means, to campus,” Pfarrer writes. “As he sees it, the challenge is to use the Mead’s collection to ‘create conversations’ with students on how those objects may relate to their own lives, or how they shed light on histories, cultures and experiences completely different than their own.”