• Programming
• Leader of the Arts

Bonnie Anne Speed

October 2007

Your Atlanta area Lexus dealers and Public Broadcasting Atlanta honor Bonnie Anne Speed, Chairman, Director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University, as our Lexus Leader of the Arts for October, 2007.

Bonnie Anne Speed has served as director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University since 2002.  Strengthening institutions’ artistic visions, building audiences and forming strategic partnerships are recurring themes in Speed’s career in museum leadership; during her tenure at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, the institution has dramatically grown and elevated the quality of its permanent collections, and has mounted a number of successful special exhibitions, including Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur, Ramesses I: The Search for the Lost Pharaoh, and Excavating Egypt: Great Discoveries from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, which will tour nationally from 2006 through 2008.

Ms. Speed formerly served as executive director of the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas.  Over two years under her leadership, the Crow Collection developed a new, ambitious program of temporary exhibitions to complement its permanent holdings, attracting new audiences and formulating compelling reasons for visitors to return regularly.  Ms. Speed is also credited with establishing the organization’s first membership program, forming a core group of supporters for the young institution.  Educational outreach is one of her priorities, and initiatives she pursued in Dallas include an innovative music series merging area musicians with Asian musicians, and a quilting festival with twelve of the city’s arts organizations forming an alliance to celebrate international quilting traditions with exhibitions and programming.  An experienced curator, Speed organized such exhibitions as Radiant Colors: Japanese Enamels from the John R. Young Collection and In the Shadow of Dragons: Later Chinese Bronzes from the Robert Kresko Collection.

Prior to joining the Crow Collection, Ms. Speed was director of visual arts at the Mitchell Museum at Cedarhurst in Mount Vernon, Illinois for 9 years.  There, she established the 90-acre Cedarhurst Sculpture Park on the grounds of the museum’s building, a historic home that housed an impressive collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century American paintings and works on paper.  Ms. Speed orchestrated all acquisitions for the sculpture park, which contained 61 works at her departure in 2000, and contributed to the Cedarhurst complex becoming southern Illinois’ leading cultural institution and a thriving destination for numerous cultural activities.

A fine art/art education graduate of the University of Southern Maine, Ms. Speed continued her studies in art history at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and San Diego State University, and earned her M.A. in art history at the University of Kansas.  She attended the Mandarin Training Center in Taipei, Taiwan, on a scholarship to study conversational and written Mandarin Chinese and is fluent in the language.

For her bold vision and commitment to the arts in Atlanta, Bonnie Anne Speed exemplifies the spirit of a Lexus Leader of the Arts.