It’s a change that might have appealed to the museum’s extraordinary and unconventional namesake. “[Gardner] didn’t believe in the types of minimalist, ‘white-box’ galleries for art that are so common today,” says Fogelman. By combining various art mediums in the same space and eschewing the use of wall labels, Gardner created what Fogelman describes as “a very singular vision of how to experience art and what an aesthetic journey should be.”

The Gardner’s magnificent collection—housed in an equally magnificent building inspired by a Venetian palace—includes painting, sculpture, and textiles, as well as extensive gardens. An additional building, opened in 2012, provides further space for focused exhibitions, as well as spoken word and musical performances. “It’s very much visitor at the center, in terms of finding your own meaning and gauging your own responses to the art,” says Fogelman. “And we’re not going to say that [taking a cellphone photo] is not a legitimate way to experience art—to record it, and through that memory, share it with friends, and come to your own conclusions.”

It was a passing comment by an organic chemistry professor, Fogelman says, that may have contributed to her career in art. Like many Hopkins freshmen, she had declared a premed major, but she also supplemented her course of study with lots of humanities electives, including English and history of art. Fogelman recalls multitasking during lab and reading and writing poetry while she waited for her experiments to come to fruition. “My lab professor told me that I wrote poetry pretty well,” she says. “And of course, my experiment yields were not quite as good, so it seemed like changing majors was the right thing to do.”

Fogelman eventually chose history of art over literature, largely due to Professor Charles Dempsey, a specialist in Baroque art. “The way that he considered art in relation to literature, politics, and art theory just demonstrated how art history was a window into a whole world in terms of the contexts in which artists were working and producing,” she explains. “I just found it incredibly stimulating, and it was very inspiring in terms of my decision to switch majors.”

That switch became the catalyst for an extensive museum career, including a long stint at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, where Fogelman worked in both the curatorial and education departments. She also served as the director of education and interpretation at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and as the chairman of education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before becoming director of collections at the Morgan Library and Museum in 2013.

With almost two years at the Gardner under her belt, Fogelman sees her mission as maintaining and building on the founder’s vision of the museum, which centers on the idea of providing an experience of beauty for a broad, diverse public. Under her helm, the museum will continue to host artists-in-residence and offer a rich roster of public events and performances, as well as build and maintain online catalogs of the collection. Fogelman is also dedicated to inviting new and returning audiences to engage with the art.

“Part of maintaining a collection as vibrant and living is doing everything we can to help people connect with it,” says Fogelman. “Art is very open to our interpretations, and it’s that process of finding our own meaning and emotion that keeps it alive.”

How far is the distance between finance and pho? For Karen Cheng ’94, about four years and 7,500 miles.

In 2005, the Wisconsin native was a decade into a career in finance and living and working in Asia. Cheng was beginning to think about what might be the next professional direction her life would take when she met Thao Nguyen on a hiking trip in Hong Kong. The two women became fast friends, and over the next few years, brainstormed long distance about leaving their respective careers and starting a business together. In 2009, Cheng, now based in San Francisco, called Nguyen, a native of Vietnam who was living in Sydney, with the idea for making healthy pho noodles based on Nguyen’s grandparents’ recipe.

“I had always loved food,” says Cheng, who points to a working trip to Vietnam in 2007 as planting the seed for her new business.

In Saigon, Cheng walked down alleys and back streets discovering stall after stall of intoxicating food. “You would just smell as you go,” Cheng recalls. She was particularly drawn to pho, the traditional Vietnamese dish of bone broth coupled with herbs, meat, and noodles. “It was fresh, delicious, and so simple,” Cheng says, “And the combination of star anise and Saigon cinnamon was super pungent. It just permeated everything.”

The women named their new company Star Anise Foods, as a nod to one of the primary ingredients in pho. And not long after the fateful phone call, Cheng, who was six months pregnant with her first child, and Nguyen, a third generation expert pho maker, spent seven weeks in Saigon meeting with potential suppliers and perfecting their first product: Happy Pho, a do-it-yourself soup mix with no artificial flavors or preservatives that home chefs could create in their kitchen in under five minutes. Their new career as food entrepreneurs was launched.

According to Cheng, Star Anise Foods is the only company making authentic Vietnamese dishes that are gluten-free, non-GMO (food that is made from genetically modified organisms), vegan, and shelf-stable. The Northern California regional office of Whole Foods Market was the first client to pick up the product. Today, nearly a dozen retailers, such as Wegman’s, Mom’s Organic Markets, and Publix, carry Star Anise Food products, and you’ll often find Cheng doing in-store demos of the company’s growing product line which includes noodles, brown rice spring roll wrappers, and Vietnamese simmer sauces.

Starting a business—especially one based in three continents—is a risk, Cheng admits, but she believes in serendipity and taking chances. Not quite 20 years ago, Cheng and her family piled into the car and left her hometown of River Hills, Wisconsin, for an East Coast college tour. Her father missed the exit for Georgetown, got lost on the Beltway, and somehow ended up at Johns Hopkins. No one in her family knew much about the university. Cheng left Baltimore smitten. She applied to only one college—Hopkins—and early admission at that.

In 2003, Cheng, an international studies major, established a scholarship for students like her younger self: in need of financial aid, possessed of a “can do” attitude, an interest in international cultures and arts, and the desire to pursue a non-traditional career. Sounds like the recipe for another successful food entrepreneur.