[She]... was born Virginia Mary Monk in 1952 in Manchester, Conn., the second of eight children in an Irish Catholic family that moved to Denville, N.J., when she was in high school. After a year of study at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, she transferred to the University of San Francisco and then to San Francisco State, where she received a master's degree in anthropology and archaeology in 1982. She studied with Maya scholar Linda Schele at the University of Texas at Austin, which granted her a doctorate in Latin American studies in 1989....
Fields began her museum work as curator of a Native American collection at the Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka, Calif., from 1984 to 1987, and taught pre-Columbian and Native American art history at UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, Humboldt State and Cal State Northridge. She arrived at LACMA as the museum's first curator of pre-Columbian art [in 1989]; in her final position she was senior curator of art of the ancient Americas... [It was also in 1989 that she met her second husband], photographer and filmmaker David Miller, while preparing a LACMA blockbuster, "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries....
[Among her accomplishments at LACMA, was the acquisition of] a rare collection of Colombian ceramics, ....She also worked with artist Jorge Pardo on a strikingly contemporary installation of ancient Latin American objects and organized "Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship," an exhibition accompanied by a catalog that won the Assn. for Latin American Art's 2007 book award...
The museum's holding of ancient American art grew from about 700 pieces to more than 3,000 objects during Fields' tenure. Her legacy will also include "Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico," a traveling exhibition opening at LACMA next April [2012], and a planned research center that's expected to develop the premier digital resource for the study of the ancient Americas....
"She cared deeply about disseminating Mesoamerican culture to a wider audience," said Karl Taube, a professor of anthropology at UC Riverside who contributed to the catalog of "The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland," a 2001-02 exhibition organized by Fields and Mexican scholar Victor Zamudio-Taylor. [She is also responsible for organizing an] Olmec show which inaugurated the museum's Resnick Pavilion with massive portrait heads and smaller sculptures produced by Mexico's earliest civilization...
The show Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico reminds us that she knew well the Olmec portrayal of jaguars, since they are an iconic animal in Olmec culture.
I think she looks like a very nice lady.
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