Amanda Dotseth sits at her home in East Dallas, which is decorated with art from travels. Photography by Yuvie Styles.
Amanda Dotseth is the first to say she has no artistic talent. That hasn’t prevented her from turning art into a lifelong obsession and career — one that has led her to make local history as the first female director of SMU’s Meadows Museum.
Seeing collections at the University of Arizona Museum of Art were enough to ignite Dotseth’s interest in art from a young age. Her AP Art History class took a trip to the museum, where she could see works by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko along with Spanish art.
“As a high school student in Tucson, Arizona, I got to see old master paintings, and that’s pretty special,” Dotseth says.
In college at the University of Arizona, she knew she wanted to take art history classes, and to do that, she had to major in the field. Dotseth decided to take a yearlong study abroad program in Madrid, Spain, a country she first visited at age 12.
During her year abroad, Dotseth could study Picasso in front of one of his paintings and take classes at the Prado.
The University of Arizona’s art museum was the first Dotseth worked at. As a student, she was posted at the front desk, though she had opportunities to take on other responsibilities, such as helping with events and monitoring galleries. Eventually, she ended up as an assistant to the associate director, which allowed her to help with grant applications.
“Once they find out you’re halfway competent, you get kind of pulled into things and you know, it’s the good news about small museums,” Dotseth says.
After graduation, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to research architecture and architectural restoration in Spain.
“That was really, I would say, the kind of game changer that was like, ‘OK, this is definitely the career for me,’” Dotseth says. “It’s one thing to study in the classroom and be like, ‘Oh, pretty,’ or, ‘Oh, I got to go stand at the Prado and look at “Las Meninas.’” But if you still love it after you’ve spent three days in archives, I think you’re in good shape.”
Dotseth, who now lives in East Dallas, earned her master’s degree in art history from Southern Methodist University in 2006 and worked in a curatorial position for three years at the Meadows Museum. Later, she went to London, earning a Ph.D. in medieval Spanish art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2015.
While working toward her doctorate, Dotseth had a fellowship in Madrid at the Spanish National Research Council. She was part of a team researching women as makers of medieval art and architecture, highlighting women’s talents and contributions to the fields.
“The impression is that when you find a female artist in the Middle Ages that she’s an exception,” Dotseth says. “But in, I would say, most cases, we don’t actually know if it was a man or a woman. It’s anonymous. So the argument is, anonymous could be a woman and probably was in a lot of instances.”
She came back to Dallas as the Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Meadows Museum. Then she became a curator under Mark A. Roglán, who led the museum for 20 years before his death in 2021.
Earlier this year, Dotseth was named the new director of the museum.
Though the title is a milestone, Dotseth points to other accomplishments she has achieved leading up to the appointment.
For example, she played a key role in bringing an exhibition on Francisco Gallego to the museum in 2008. The project began around 2004, when Dotseth was still a student. Twenty-six panel paintings created in the late-medieval period were shipped from Arizona to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where they underwent technical analysis, including infrared reflectography. The imaging allows researchers to see the underdrawings below the paint.
“These kinds of projects happen a lot, where the imaging happens but it’s not necessarily published,” Dotseth says. “And in this case, that was what was the big deal. There was a catalog with scholarly essays, and we published all of those infrared reflectograms.”
Plus, the images were displayed in the exhibition.
Dotseth is also proud of acquisitions the museum has made in recent years, pieces made by lesser-known artists important to Spanish art.
Now as director, Dotseth spends time speaking with art sellers, leading museum tours, teaching classes, completing administrative work, discussing potential collaborations with other museums and working on outreach strategies.
“I think it’s important to be the first female director of the Meadows Museum so that other women working at other art museums in other positions see someone like them in charge,” Dotseth says. “And something we’re all working on across the field is diversifying our employee base with men, women, people of color, all of that.”
