Remembering Anne Bromberg, Dallas Museum of Art curator and art scholar

Anne Bromberg, a respected art scholar who worked at the Dallas Museum of Art as a lecturer, educator and curator for nearly six decades, died Dec. 8, 2023, at her home in Highland Park, according to her obituary. She was 87.

Bromberg was named curator emerita at the DMA in 2020 after serving as the curator of ancient and Asian art. She started at the museum in 1962 as a lecturer and became the head of the education department in 1975. In 1989, she moved into a curatorial role where she became a key player in developing the museum’s Asian holdings.

“I think Anne really opened a vista for those of us living in Dallas in those years of the ‘70s and ‘80s at the art museum with her,” said Gail Thomas, co-founder and former director of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and founder and former CEO of the Trinity Trust Foundation.

Thomas met Bromberg in the 1970s while working as a docent at the DMA. “She was such an extraordinary example to me and was really the reason I went back and got a PhD,” Thomas said. “After being a docent and studying with Anne, I realized I had to know more about the world. She influenced me greatly. She taught us just through her life and the gestures of her life and world. Everything she did: The way she dressed. She was just exotic in every way.”

Over her time at the DMA, Bromberg curated more than 40 special exhibitions, according to ArtDaily.com, including four of the most popular in the museum’s history. The two top-grossing shows were 2008′s “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” and 2004′s “Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong.”

Former DMA director Bonnie Pitman worked with Bromberg on big exhibitions such as the one on King Tut in 2008. “That was a huge marathon! [We] were side by side for months. We would look over checklists, [and] Anne would say in her usual way: ‘Not good enough,’ and I would go back and look for better pieces.”

Pitman, who retired as director of the DMA in 2011 and is now the director of art-brain innovations at UT Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth, recalls Bromberg as a “singular” person. “She had such a specific presence in the way she greeted you as a human being and the world around her. You could never forget her: Her hair. Her wonderful flowing garments. Her beautiful ideas.”

Artist Mary Vernon also recalls Bromberg as larger than life. “She was a kind of grand dame. Like a powerful aunt in a small town,” says Vernon, who taught art at Southern Methodist University for 50 years before retiring in 2018.

Vernon was a frequent guest lecturer for Bromberg. “[Anne] was well-educated and very widely traveled and didn’t want any argument with statements of fact made,” Vernon said. “She gave witty and intelligent lectures about all of the subjects she knew about and she demanded pretty much the same from you.”

Vernon laughed when recalling the time she called to cancel a winter lecture in Fair Park that Bromberg had organized because the roads were glazed over with ice. Naturally, Bromberg was already on site and if she could make the drive, so could Vernon.

Born in 1936, Bromberg was the youngest of four daughters, according to her obituary.

Her father was William B. Ruggles, the late editorial editor for The Dallas Morning News who is credited with coining the modern usage of the phrase “right to work” in an influential 1941 column. Her mother, Dorothy Sheridan Ruggles, was a founding member of the Dallas League of Women Voters.

Bromberg studied anthropology at Harvard University for her undergraduate degree and went on to earn her Master of Arts and doctorate there in 1961 in classical art and archeology.

She loved artifacts and the stories they reveal.

In a 2016 story for The News, contributor Lee Cullum noted that Bromberg surrounded herself with objects. “Everything in her office has a story to tell: black-and-white textiles on the walls, one from Cameroon, the other Mali; a watercolor from India; a pair of Pueblo pottery bowls (“if you start out as an archaeologist, you’re a pot person,” she says); a candleholder from South America; an armadillo from Oaxaca; on the desk, a bright blue wooden iguana from Central America; and so on and so on.”

Bromberg’s home in Highland Park was also filled with her beloved art, according to The News story. The curator had shared the house with her husband, Alan Bromberg, who died in 2014. He was a professor at SMU’s Dedman School of Law. To honor him after his death, his wife pledged $2 million to SMU to establish the Alan R. Bromberg Centennial Chair.

Anne and Alan first met as children, according to The News story. Their mothers were friends. Both Anne and Alan later went to Harvard, though Alan went on to Yale for law school.

The Brombergs bought Anne’s mother’s house in Highland Park and never left. “They made of it a showcase of their life together,” Cullum wrote. “Masks, African and Indonesian, are hanging on wall after wall. Textiles, too. A huge tree trunk from China carved into a tiger sits on the floor beneath a Matisse drawing in heavy charcoal of a young man’s face.”

Bromberg explained at the time: “We were on the same wavelength,” she said of Alan, who had been gone two years. “I do things now, but I am not really living. Our house contains our whole life together.”

A private memorial will be held for Bromberg this spring. The family asks for any donations to be made to the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden or Preservation Dallas to honor the late curator’s love of nature and the city of Dallas.