M. Jordan Love

M. Jordan Love is the Carol R. Angle academic curator and co-interim director at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, where she has overseen the education department since 2012. Love’s career as an art historian, educator and museum curator spans more than 25 years. Her experience working in museums in curation, education, collections, and marketing have expanded her role and furthered her mission of making art accessible to diverse audiences.

Under Love’s leadership, the education department has grown to host university classes with over 2,000 enrolled students per year in addition to 4,000 K-12 students in Charlottesville and nine surrounding counties. The Fralin is also known for having one of the oldest and largest student docent programs in the country, having been a cornerstone of the museum for over 35 years. Upon her arrival on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, Love took over a new fledgling museum studies class and developed it into an internship program, adding an undergraduate, student-curated exhibition as part of the class experience, which is organized annually by The Fralin’s student interns under Love’s guidance. She was also tasked with forming relationships with faculty, few of whom utilized the museum in teaching. Working directly with professors and graduate students to include the museum’s temporary exhibitions and permanent collections in their curricula, she also partnered with faculty as collaborators and curators for exhibitions. Under her tenure, the number of university departments using the museum to enrich their curriculum has risen to include over 40 units and groups across the University, 60% of which are outside the art department. These include the medical and nursing schools, the education school, the Darden school of business, history, American studies, African and African American studies, dance, religion, French, German, Spanish, Russian, creative writing, anthropology, media studies, and many more. She also expanded her outreach by teaching undergraduate courses in the art department that focus on researching The Fralin’s permanent collection.

As part of her outreach efforts, Love developed a partnership with the UVA School of Medicine to create the workshop Clinician’s Eye, a program that uses art analysis to help medical students improve their observational and diagnostic skills. This program is now taught at the Fralin every year to all 160 first-year medical school students. Love further partnered with HeArt of Medicine, a student-run, interprofessional program that offers innovative end-of-life education for nursing and medical students at the University of Virginia. She created a workshop centered on art in the Fralin collection that deals with death and dying, creating meaningful conversations that will assist students in their interactions with future patients.

Love earned a doctorate in art history from Columbia University, completing her dissertation research on medieval art and architecture. She also pursued study in Oceanic art, inspired by having lived on Easter Island for a year as a child. Love earned a bachelor’s degree, cum laude in art history and economics from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She previously held curatorial positions at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in her native Wyoming, where she worked with objects once owned by Butch Cassidy.