The Custard Institute Founding Event
The gift from Linda P. Custard ’60, ’99 and William A. Custard ’57 was, at the time, the largest personal contribution in the history of the Meadows Museum. Matching funds from The Meadows Foundation made it possible to establish this new cultural institute.
Image, left: first row L to R: Linda P. Custard, SMU Trustee Emerita and Chair, Meadows Museum Advisory Council; Mark A. Roglán, Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum and Centennial Chair in Meadows School of the Arts; William A. Custard. Second row L to R: Peter Miller, President and CEO, The Meadows Foundation; R. Gerald Turner, President, SMU; Samuel S. Holland, Meadows School of the Arts Dean, SMU; Brad E. Cheves, Vice President for Development and External Affairs, SMU. (Photo courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Kim Leeson.)
Meadows Museum’s late director, Mark A. Roglán
CISAC was the brainchild of the Meadows Museum’s late director, Mark A. Roglán (pictured, left), who was celebrating his twentieth anniversary at the Meadows Museum at the time of the institute’s foundation. Long an influential advocate for the study of Spanish art in America, Roglán’s decades of leadership and dedication is honored through the named Mark A. Roglán Director of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at the Meadows Museum.
P. Gregory Warden, the inaugural Mark A. Roglán Director of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture.
P. Gregory Warden, is the inaugural Mark A. Roglán Director of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture. Warden was a faculty member at SMU for 30 years, where he was a University Distinguished Professor of Art History. An award-winning and beloved teacher, he is also an internationally recognized scholar whose work has been supported by the Kress Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His current recent research interests are heritage, architectural conservation, and the application of digital technologies to issues of preservation. A native of Italy, Warden was the founder, Principal Investigator, and co-Director of the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project and excavations at Poggio Colla, a joint mission of SMU, Franklin University, Marshall College, the University of Texas, the Open University (UK), and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012 he joined Franklin University as president, where he oversaw landmark achievements such as dual U.S.-Swiss accreditation; partnerships with the United Nations (UNITAR) and numerous universities in the US, Europe, and Asia for graduate programs in climate action and sustainability; its first WURI international ranking in 2017 (44th in the top 100), moving up to 33rd by 2022; the first Green Office at a Swiss or American university; the establishment of a Scholarships Without Borders program for refugees from Syria, and now Ukraine; and successful fulfillment of its first-ever capital campaign.
Anna Ficek, Postdoctoral Fellow, Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at Southern Methodist University
Agnieszka Anna Ficek is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at Southern Methodist University and the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. She holds a PhD in art history from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and is a specialist on eighteenth-century exoticisms. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, From Allegory to Revolution: South America in the Early Modern French Imagination, which focuses on transatlantic visual and material cultures, as well as the cultural and scientific exchange between France and the Spanish American colonies. She has taught Art History survey courses, and specialized courses in Baroque and Rococo art at Baruch College, City College of New York, and Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Blanca Pons-Sorolla, independent researcher and leading expert on the work of Joaquín Sorolla
Blanca Pons-Sorolla, an independent researcher and leading expert on the work of Joaquín Sorolla, her great-grandfather, is the inaugural Affiliated Scholar with the Custard Institute for Spanish Art & Culture. She is known for having curated Sorolla and America (2013–14), an exhibition that traveled from the Meadows Museum to the San Diego Museum of Art and the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid. She also co-curated the exhibition Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) at the Prado in 2009. Her books include Joaquín Sorolla: Vida y obra (2001), Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923) (2009), Sorolla: The Masterworks (2012), Sorolla and the Paris Years (2016), Sorolla. Jardines (2018), and Sorolla Catalogue Raisonné: Painting Collection of The Museo Sorolla (2019). She is a trustee of the Fundación Museo Sorolla in Madrid and chairs its standing committee. In 2009 she received the Sorolla Medal from the Hispanic Society of America in New York for her contribution to Hispanic arts and culture. Pons-Sorolla collaborated again with the Meadows Museum for their 2023 exhibition Spanish Light: Sorolla in American Collections. She is currently working on a multivolume catalogue raisonné of the artist, and, most recently, was the co-curator of the exhibit Sorolla a través de la luz at the Palacio Real in Madrid.
