SAN ANTONIO — Kids don't say they want to be a museum curator when they grow up in the same way they dream about becoming an astronaut, a movie star or president.
In the case of Jessica Powers, she hardly even saw the inside of an art museum before arriving at college. Instead, she was losing herself in books while growing up in in rural Virginia—learning from those pages about life in ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt.
"When I got to college I realized that you can take classes in this," she said. "I turned out to find it completely fascinating."
That fascination would eventually pave Powers' path from studying at the University of Michigan – where she arrived not yet knowing what she might want to study until she started flipping through a course catalogue – to joining the curatorial staff at the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) in 2006, "almost immediately" after achieving her doctorate.
She's since overseen SAMA's 3,000-piece-strong collection of ancient Mediterranean art, and will continue to do so in her new appointment as the museum's chief curator, announced earlier this month. Having worked in the position in an interim capacity since 2021 (the last full-time head curator, William Rudolph, left in 2020 after six and a half years), Powers will now lead SAMA's curatorial team in brainstorming new ways to showcase a museumwide collection 10 times larger.
"I could never be an expert in all the areas SAMA has in its collection, but what's exciting is I'm constantly learning something new," she said. "Learning about different cultures, different periods of art, different artists I've never studied."
Powers' new role is broadly administrative, meaning that while she won't be sifting through SAMA's thousands of pieces with her own two hands, she'll be thinking about potential future exhibits and helping advance them "on a nuts-and-bolts level" while considering new acquisitions.
It may seem daunting considering SAMA's exhaustive collection, ranging from ceremonial African tools and 1950s American portraiture to 1st-century Roman busts and Greek pottery thousands of years old. Powers sees that sheer depth as "part of what makes this work interesting and exciting."
It helps, for one thing, that planning for the museum's exhibits is measured not in weeks or months, but years. Powers said SAMA tends to be thinking two years down the road when it comes to future programming.
“The average museum visitor doesn’t have a sense of how much planning in advance goes into organizing the exhibitions—all the research work, deciding what works will be included, making arrangements to borrow works from other institutions.”
At the same time, she adds, Powers says it's important to her that SAMA is highlighting a variety of art on any given day. That's why a museum visitor this month could hop from a newly opened exhibit celebrating 250 years of American art ("American Made") to a showcase of Mexican clay artistry to a display of Japanese bamboo baskets.
Variety is one way the museum is trying to work back to pre-pandemic attendance; the museum saw about 170,000 visitors in 2018-2019, compared to to just under 114,000 in 2021-2022. Powers says the museum is also in the process of producing a book putting its history on the page; the book would explore the evolution of the north-downtown property SAMA calls home from brewery to arts institution.
“Our exhibitions reflect the global scope of our collection," she said. "There’s always something new and different to see.”
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