REMEMBERING MARK ROGLÁN

Dr. Mark Roglán. Courtesy of the Meadows Museum. Dr. Mark Roglan (left), and Janet Kafka (right) at Linda P. Custard's (center) decoration ceremony sanctioned by King Felipe VI of Spain. Photograph by Tamytha Cameron.

As the Meadows Museum mourns the loss of its director, it looks ahead to the legacy he built.

BY NANCY COHEN ISRAEL

“M ark’s superpower was bringing people together,” says Dr. Amanda Dotseth, Meadows Museum curator and interim director. Over the past few months, the

Meadows Museum family has been united in their grief over Dr.

Mark Roglán’s passing. Our community lost a beloved leader, respected scholar, and brilliant visionary. Roglán arrived from his native Madrid in 2001 to be the museum’s curator. Within five years, he became its director. In this capacity, he catapulted the institution onto a global stage.

According to Linda Custard, chair of the Meadows Museum

Advisory Council, “He turned a sleepy institution into one with an international presence.” Many recall him as a dynamo who made things happen. “Mark was always sitting on ‘go.’ He never put the brakes on any idea,” says Janet Kafka, Honorary Consul of Spain and advisory council member. Maintaining that energy even as he battled cancer, Roglán oversaw the museum’s most recent acquisitions, including the spectacular Portrait of a Lady (1621) painted by Bartolomé González y Serrano. Members of the advisory council purchased it collectively in honor of Roglán’s 20th anniversary with the institution. It was an easy decision for the group. As Kafka states, “Mark’s standards were always excellent. We followed his lead on anything he needed for the museum. He always thought of the institution first.”

Roglán’s final legacy is the establishment of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at the Meadows Museum. “Mark and I had been talking about this for five years,” Custard says, adding “The institute is his vision. He did everything in his power to make this happen.” The generosity of Linda, along with her husband, William A. Custard, and the Meadows Foundation, brought Roglán’s dream to fruition. Custard also credits SMU president Gerald Turner for his supportive role as plans for the institute coalesced.

In many ways, the Custard Institute embodies Roglán’s strengths of diplomacy and connection. “He had that skill set that combined a level of expertise with a tremendous skill of coalition building,” Custard explains. It was also a logical next step as a follow-up to the fellowship program he established. “The goal of the fellowship program is to support the next generation of scholars,” says Dotseth, an alumna of this initiative. She adds, “The Custard Institute represents an opportunity to bring in new voices, new subjects, and new ideas, which will tangentially inform the collection. The institute is very much the research arm of the museum. For Mark, it was the thing that would put the Meadows on the top.”

Roglán was present at the announcement of the Custard Institute and was instrumental in the selection of P. Gregory Warden as the inaugural Mark A. Roglán Director of the Custard Institute. The decision to name the director’s position for Roglán, according to Custard, came at the suggestion of Peter M. Miller, president and CEO of the Meadows Foundation.

Warden spent over 30 years at SMU before moving to Switzerland to serve as president of Franklin University. Prior to his move, he worked closely with Roglán, of whom says, “Working with Mark was very much like latching onto a whirlwind, and he was just as energetic even while dealing with crushing health issues. It [the institute] is his legacy, and I think he thought of it that way.”

Of the vision, Warden says, “Obviously, this kind of ambition will take time to realize, but the groundwork has been laid, thanks to Mark’s outstanding accomplishments at the Meadows Museum. An institute that is connected to a first-class museum at an excellent university such as SMU has enormous potential.” P