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A Newsletter by the City of Saco, Maine	August, 2008	Return to newsletter index

Saco Museum Head Appointed

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Jessica Skwire Routhier, associate curator of the Portland Museum of Art, has accepted the position of director of the Saco Museum, according to Leslie Rounds, executive director of the Dyer Library and Saco Museum.

Routhier has worked at the Portland Museum of Art since 1997, and previously held the titles of curatorial assistant and assistant curator. She was promoted to associate curator in 2005. Routhier is a graduate of Bowdoin College and Tufts University, where she received a Master's Degree in Art History and Museum Studies in 1996.

She was the recipient of a research fellowship in the European Paintings Department at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1996, and from there went on to the curatorial department at the Portland Museum of Art. In 2005, Routhier attended the prestigious Fall Institute at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. She was awarded a full scholarship to this intensive two-week course in American decorative arts.

She has curated exhibitions and authored several publications focusing on 19th century art in Maine, including the 2007 exhibition, "Vividly True to Nature: Harrison Bird Brown 1831-1915." She was also actively involved in the reinterpretation of the Portland Museum of Art's McLellan House and L. D. M. Sweat Memorial galleries and was in charge of the reinstallation and reinterpretation of the museum's extensive holdings of glass and ceramics. Recently, Routhier was the museum's curator for the traveling exhibition, "The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library," and curated the museum's new exhibition "American Menagerie." She played an important role in the Portland exhibition of paintings by John Brewster Jr. that featured several works from the Saco Museum.

The Saco Museum is a regional museum of fine and decorative arts and historic artifacts. The museum was founded in 1866 and is the third oldest in Maine. The Saco Museum's collection contains more than 10,000 artifacts, including superb collections of documented local furniture, clocks, and other decorative arts such as silver, ceramics, textiles, and costumes. Well known for its rich collection of paintings and portraits from the Saco River region, the Saco Museum also features the finest and largest collection of portraits by the renowned deaf artist John Brewster, Jr. (1766-1854).