The curator becomes the first woman director in the school’s 400-year history
Alexia Fabre, the longtime chef curator of MAC VAL, a major contemporary art museum in the outskirts of Paris, has been appointed director of École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She becomes the first woman to take the helm of the 400-year-old institution, succeeding Jean de Loisy whose tenure came to an end in January. While the school’s recent appointments have been embroiled in controversy, with critics pointing to the lack of diversity and generational renewal in its leadership, Fabre’s nomination has been widely celebrated in the press, with an article in the French newspaper Le Monde exclaiming ‘Finally a woman at the head of Paris’s Beaux-Arts!’
After graduating from the École du Louvre and the National Heritage Institute, Fabre started her career directing the departmental museum of the city of Gap in the south of France before embarking on the foundation of the future MAC VAL in 1998. Until the museum’s inauguration in 2005 in the Parisian suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine, Fabre oversaw the conception and construction of the project. She also started managing and growing the fond d’art contemporain, a collection started in 1982 by the department which would become part of the museum, with an emphasis on women artists. Over the years Fabre established the reputation of the museum through exhibitions of leading French and international artists including Christian Boltanski, Esther Ferrer, Nil Yalter or Jesper Just, and audacious and engaging hangings of the collections following thematic (instead of chronological) readings, ‘like Tate Modern’ she told Le Monde. Fabre has also been active teaching at the École du Louvre (2007–12) and curating projects including two editions of Paris’s Nuit Blanche, a nocturnal celebration of culture throughout the city, and Manif D’art 8 – Québec City Biennial in 2015.
The school leadership has come under fire over the past decade facing multiple claims of sexual and moral harassment from students, as well as racist behaviour, bringing the tenure of Jean-Marc Bustamante to a premature end in 2018. During his time running the school, De Loisy has started addressing some of these issues, notably by rehauling the faculty and setting up a counselling unit to receive and address complaints from students, while also supporting students’ professional experience through a curating and exhibition platform.
