OXFORD, U.K.—On November 7, Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Britain’s oldest public museum, reopens with a sleek new £61 million ($100 million) extension designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather. The Ashmolean’s collection, which includes antiquities, medieval jewelry, Michelangelo drawings, Pre-Raphaelite paintings and more, is one of Britain’s best, and the museum is seizing the opportunity to present it anew. Director Christopher Brown told Darrell Hartman his plans to shake things up.

With such a large and ambitious architectural undertaking, you can rethink the way you present the collections. The new displays, which we’ve called Crossing Cultures Crossing Time, stress contact and exchange between cultures rather than cultural difference. The Ashmolean long had a very strong departmental structure: Western art, Eastern art, archeological collections and so on. We want to break down the barriers between departments.

It’s a very radical plan. I don’t think anybody’s done it quite like this. There are themed galleries — money, writing, the human image, for instance — filled with objects from different cultures arranged chronologically so visitors can witness how civilizations influenced each other. One exhibit leads visitors through the museum as though they were traveling through Bronze Age Greece, the ancient Near East, European prehistory, Classical Greece and Rome and then India. It’s really about how trading routes were the key to cultural growth. It would be hard to do this with a much larger collection. The Ashmolean has holdings of a similar importance to, say, the British Museum, but not on the same scale. With eight galleries for Classical Greece, you inevitably lose the narrative.

"Point of View: Christopher Brown" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2009 Table of Contents.