Dr. Alex Rich, AGB Museum of Art

H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., is Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art (The AGB, formerly the Polk Museum of Art) and Chair of the Department of Art History and Museum Studies at Florida Southern College. At Florida Southern, he is also Associate Professor of Art History and holds the George and Dorothy Forsythe Endowed Chair in Art History and Museum Studies. Dr. Rich is a specialist in Modern and Contemporary art history, with a particular focus on European and American art of the 19th and 20th centuries. He earned his Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and his A.B. from Dartmouth College.

A native of New York City, Dr. Rich has led The AGB through a period of exciting transformation and growth, first as it evolved from its storied legacy as a community museum into an academic and community museum affiliated with Florida Southern and most recently as it opened its major expansion in January 2025, fulfilling a more than three-decade-long dream for the Museum and adding 14,000-square-feet (including seven new galleries and innovative learning spaces) to its 1988 building.

Dr. Rich is also curator of more than sixty far-ranging and acclaimed museum exhibitions, including Masters of Spain: Goya and Picasso, Renoir: Les Études, Rembrandt’s Academy, Chagall: Stories into Dreams, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Belle Époque, The Art of the Highwaymen, Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois: Painting the Real, Remembering Vilna: The Holocaust and the Art of Samuel Bak, and Rockwell/Wyeth: Icons of Americana at The AGB. Before moving to Lakeland in 2014, Dr. Rich taught previously in both the History of Art Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York and in the City University of New York system. Prior to joining the staff of the then Polk Museum in 2017 and becoming its executive director in 2019, he has also worked in both curatorial and education capacities at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH.