Congratulations are in order for Marie-Laure Buku Pongo. This summer she was promoted from assistant to associate curator of decorative arts at the Frick Collection in New York. But there wasn’t much time to celebrate her new position; Buku Pongo has been busy planning and managing new installations of the Frick’s ceramic collection throughout both floors of the museum as part of the Renovation and Enhancement Project to modernize the 1914 mansion. Among the highly anticipated upgrades, the famous Boucher Room has been moved back to its original location on the second floor—initially the boudoir, or sitting room, of Adelaide Childs Frick—and will display Sèvres and Vincennes porcelain. Also on the newly renovated second floor, which will be open to visitors for the first time and will expand the museum’s exhibition capability by 25 percent, will be installations of Du Paquier and other porcelains and, in what was originally Adelaide Frick’s bedroom, a striking display of recently acquired eighteenth-century French faience from Sidney R. Knafel. Buku Pongo has ensured that this new donation will literally reach new heights by mounting the tableware vertically on terra-cotta-colored walls—in a nod to the manner in which Knafel displayed his treasures in his Manhattan apartment.
But it’s not just about the ceramics. “We are moving a whole museum,” Buku Pongo explains. “It’s both challenging and very exciting.” As part of this big move, she stays busy with researching and planning for the museum’s decorative arts collections and future exhibitions, working alongside the Frick’s conservation team. She is also working on two side projects: a guide to the Frick’s collection written with colleagues Aimee Ng and Giulio Dalvit and a text for the museum’s famed Diptych book series.
Buku Pongo’s interest in art history began in her childhood home of Brussels, where she nurtured a passion for reading and, because of her father’s career as a publisher, grew up around scholars. “My father was telling me when I was around the age of six or seven, ‘Try to think about something you could study and make it your own.’” She spent her college years at the Sorbonne, École du Louvre, and Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas, and completed her academic career with a PhD in history and art history and a dissertation that explores the diplomatic gifts offered by Louis XV—a project that, fingers crossed, will be published as a book in the future.
As Buku Pongo was pursuing her doctorate, she applied for, but did not receive, an internship at the Palace of Versailles, which she had frequently visited during her studies. But that didn’t end her relationship with the iconic museum; she received the rare opportunity to assist with the traveling exhibition Visitors to Versailles: Travelers, Princes, Ambassadors (1682–1789), organized by Versailles and the Met. “The curator [Bertrand Rondot] said, ‘Oh with your dissertation, I see you’re working on diplomatic gifts and during that show we will have a lot of diplomatic gifts, so would you be willing to work with me?’ . . . That’s where Ilearned how to handle porcelain and objects,” she recalls. When not writing catalogue entries and meeting with lenders for the show, she assisted with the preservation and exhibiting of Versailles’s permanent collection and helped maintain the apartments of Marie Antoinette and Louis XV’s daughters.
After the exhibition ended, Buku Pongo transitioned to the Mission de l’ameublement. This initiative of the Mobilier National provides historical furniture and decorative objects for French palaces and the offices of high-ranking politicians, including those of the president and first lady of France, secretaries of state, and overseas officials. “It’s always very intense, but it’s also very exciting because you get to see places of power in another way,” she says. “It was also interesting to work with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pieces and then contemporary designs, which were a new thing for me.”
Buku Pongo next found herself again at Versailles as an assistant for the exhibition Versailles and the World, held at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which explored the diplomatic influence of the renowned palace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the exhibition and directed her back to the Mobilier National, where she continued her previous work with the Mission de l’ameublement. By late 2020, Buku Pongo was on the move again, but this time to her new position as assistant curator of decorative arts at the Frick Collection.
She soon found that some curatorial responsibilities in American museums differed from those in Europe, such as fundraising, which is less vital in Europe than in the US, and conservation. “In countries like France and Italy, they treat the objects as almost archaeological, which is less the case [in the United States]. In France, they will be very reluctant to touch anything and to restore anything. If you have a piece of furniture here, you have more flexibility.” With her European training, Buku Pongo has found a balance at her American employer.
For those contemplating a career similar to Buku Pongo’s, she advises, “Don’t give up, it can be very tough . . . be persistent and really have those internships, fellowships, or professional experiences in museums because that’s where you learn.” In her own experience, she found the advice of Bertrand Rondot incredibly helpful: “he was really knowledgeable and very willing to give and transmit his knowledge. I learned so much from him and I’m very grateful.” She also recommends frequently visiting the places that inspire your career goals, “Go to galleries, go to auction houses, look at the objects, look at paintings, really be in contact with the objects.” Here again she’s speaking from her own experience. As a student at the École du Louvre, she took class trips to some of Paris’s best historic institutions. “We would go to Versailles, to the Louvre in the Islamic art departments and then see the objects and study them. It makes such a change when you see the object.”
When not in the Frick’s galleries, Buku Pongo has curated a rich life outside of work in New York. She fosters her deep love for music with visits to Carnegie Hall and the Met Opera and takes piano lessons. She has such adventurous interests as fencing and attends events about space and the planets. And when she’s not busy with work and play, she dreams about taking flying lessons, riding the Orient Express “from Paris to Istanbul,” and one day venturing to the Topkapi Palace in the latter city to see a brazier by Jean-Claude Chambellan Duplessis that Louis XV gave to the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud I in 1742.
“I feel very lucky because I’m very passionate about decorative arts. The fact that I get to work and see those wonderful masterpieces and do what I love is very rewarding.” Although fate has been in her favor, Buku Pongo’s career results from years of dedication and hard work. “Sometimes it can be down to a bit of luck, but you have to do the work at the end because if you are hired, it’s because you are supposed to be the best and you’re supposed to be really good at what you do.”
