“Campbell, born in Singapore, raised in the UK and educated at Oxford and the Courtald Institute of Art in London, arrived at the Met as an assistant curator in 1995. “Tapestry Tom”, as he came to be known, is the first to admit that his appointment as director 14 years later came as much as a surprise to him as his colleagues. While he had curated critically acclaimed exhibitions, he was not seen as an obvious leader, nor as his predecessor Philippe de Montebello’s heir apparent.
“When they first approached me, I thought, ‘My god, you’ve got to be joking’,” Campbell recalled. “But when I thought about it, there was a logic to it. I was a mid-career curator who was passionate about the museum and its mission and had perhaps a fairly good idea of how it needed to evolve.”