Art news daily: 30 November

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

British Museum and Google launch digital project to preserve Mayan heritage | The British Museum, in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, yesterday announced the launch of their new ‘Preserving Maya Heritage’ project, which has digitised and made available online for the first time the museum’s holdings of ancient Mayan artefacts. The collection, which includes over 250 photographic plates and hundreds of late 19th-century plaster casts of archaeological sites, was originally compiled by British explorer Alfred Maudslay, one of the first Europeans to study and communicate his discoveries of Mayan culture.

Tim Knox is appointed director of Royal Collection | Tim Knox, current director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, has been appointed as the new director of the Royal Collection, which looks after both the royal family’s art collection and the Queen’s official residences that are open to the public. Before joining the Fitzwilliam in 2013, Knox held positions including directorship of the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and head curator at the National Trust. He will begin his role at the Royal Collection in the new year.

US foundations create $6m scheme to diversify museum leadership | The Ford Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation in the United States have announced the creation of a $6 million campaign to diversify the leadership positions in the nation’s art museums. The Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative will fund around 20 institutions (selected from a wider pool of applicants) over the next three years with the goal of, by 2025, having filled 30 per cent of mid- and senior-level positions with employees from historically under-represented populations. Participants in the initiative, which include the Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, will be required to match the grants with their own funding.