Maxwell L. Anderson (born May 1, 1956)[1] is an American art historian, former museum administrator, and non-profit executive, who currently serves as President of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

[4] While in Atlanta he inaugurated a series of loan projects[5] highlighting unpublished treasures from the storerooms of some of the world's leading museums in London, Paris, Rome, Mexico City, and elsewhere, looking for alternatives to buying antiquities from the illicit trade, expanded the Museum[6] with architect Michael Graves, and greatly enlarged the permanent collection.

[8] Anderson served as the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City from 1998 to 2003.

[9] While at the Whitney, he initiated the first multinational art purchase,[10] a work by Bill Viola today jointly owned by the Whitney Museum, the Pompidou, and the Tate, to cope with the large scale of many contemporary artworks in variable media, and created a seat for an artist on the Board of Trustees, with Chuck Close as its first incumbent.

[citation needed] In 2016 Anderson was appointed president of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an Atlanta-based collection of African American art from the Southeast.

[citation needed] He has lectured and published on general issues of museum practice, especially on the ethical collection of antiquities,[20] institutional transparency, free expression, artists' rights, and the use of new technologies.

At the Michael C. Carlos Museum he negotiated several long-term loans of previously unpublished archaeological material to underscore the value of provenance.

[27] In December 2016 Oxford University Press published his book "Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to Know"[28] Anderson was one of the earliest proponents of using new media technologies to advance public interest in art.