SAN ANTONIO, TX.- The San Antonio Museum of Art announced today that educator and art collector May Lam, High Line co-founder Robert Hammond, and former museum director Héctor Rivero Borrell have joined the Museum’s Board of Trustees. Each of them has long experience working in the arts across a range of different areas, all of which will benefit SAMA during this period of change and challenge for museums. They will officially begin their terms in October 2020, serving a three-year term.

“It is with gratitude for their commitment to the San Antonio Museum of Art that I welcome May, Robert, and Héctor to the board,” said Edward Hart, chair of the Museum’s Board of Trustees. “As an institution with a significant collection of Latin American art, both historic and contemporary, we have been looking to expand our board connections in this region, too. As a former museum director with experience in exhibition design and museography, Héctor is exactly the right person to bring a new voice and perspective to the Museum. Robert is a San Antonio native who has accomplished so much in promoting architecture and art as part of civic life, subjects that are important to SAMA and its place in this city. And we are thrilled to welcome May back to the board after an absence of several years. Her contributions to SAMA over the years have been foundational, including important gifts of Australian Aboriginal art.”




May Lam
May Lam was born in China and educated in Hong Kong, England, Boston, and New York, earning degrees in early childhood education, fine arts, art education, and recreation therapy. She met her husband, Victor Lam, while studying occupational therapy and moved to San Antonio in 1976. Since then, she has served a number of different roles in the civic life of the city, including: twice leading San Antonio’s delegation to the U.S. Mayors conference in Hong Kong to promote foreign investments in the city; founding the yearly San Antonio Asian New Year festival in 1984; and serving in various roles at the McNay Art Museum, the Witte Museum, the Blue Star Gallery and Museum, and the Museum Reach Committee of the San Antonio River Foundation. She and her husband have made a number of donations to SAMA, including, in 2016, a collection of 127 works of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art, which was presented at the Museum in the 2017 exhibition Of Country and Culture. Through all of these experiences with organizations across the city, she has been focused on encouraging greater participation from the various minority communities across San Antonio.

Robert Hammond
Robert Hammond was born and raised in San Antonio; he graduated with Honors in History from Princeton University. Although he is perhaps most widely known as the co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line, having led the effort to build an elevated park on an abandoned railway line in Manhattan, he has a long background in work that focuses on art and architecture projects in a civic context. Prior to the High Line, he worked as a consultant for the Times Square Alliance, Alliance for the Arts and National Cooperative Bank, and was an ex-officio Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Robert was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in 2009 and the Vincent Scully Prize for “excellence in historic preservation” from the National Building Museum in 2013.

Héctor Rivero Borrell
Héctor Rivero Borrell studied industrial design and graduated from Mexico’s Universidad Iberoamericana, where he is now a professor of museography and exhibition design; he also has a master's degree in museums. In 1993, he began his career as director of the Franz Mayer Museum, where he organized traveling exhibitions that raised awareness of the museum and its collections internationally, in countries such as Italy, Spain, China, Japan, France, Argentina, and Great Britain, among others. He is a member of the Quorum and Codigram, the College of Industrial and Graphic Designers of Mexico. He has also served as president of the International Council of Museums Mexico.