Displaying items by tag: director

Susan Strickler, who has guided the Currier Museum as director and CEO since 1996, has announced her retirement as of June 2016. Upon her retirement, Strickler's tenure as director will be the longest in the Currier's 86-year history. Her visionary guidance converted the once-small museum to one of regional and national renown.

"Susan has had a remarkable two-decade tenure at the helm of the Currier - which was a time of wonderful artistic growth and institutional expansion, raising the profile of the Currier as one of the nation's finest mid-sized museums," said M. Christine Dwyer, Currier Museum of Art Board president.

The Worcester Art Museum announced today that it has obtained a gift of $4 million to endow its director position, which is currently held by Matthias Waschek. The gift, which the museum is touting as the largest award for a staff position in WAM history, came from the Myles & C. Jean McDonough Foundation, on behalf of Jean McDonough. The position will now be named the C. Jean and Myles McDonough Director.

Dia Art Foundation has named art historian and curator James Meyer to fill two leadership posts as the New York-based nonprofit known for its cavernous exhibition space in Beacon, N.Y., works to reassert its presence in Chelsea.

In January Mr. Meyer, now an associate curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will become Dia’s deputy director. He will also be chief curator, a newly created role that Dia’s director, Jessica Morgan, said reflected the foundation’s expanded scope.

Plans for the Dia Art Foundation to build a new home in Manhattan have been scrapped. Jessica Morgan, who took up her post as director in January, says she is “not pursuing” the project started by the previous head, Philippe Vergne, who planned to construct a new building on the footprint of two of Dia’s three existing sites in the city.

Instead, Morgan is exploring other ways to re-establish Dia’s presence in Chelsea.

Maxwell Anderson has resigned from the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), where he has served as director since early 2012, the Dallas Morning News reported. The veteran museum director is headed to the New Cities Foundation (NCF), where he will serve as director of grant programs and “help develop ways of supporting NCF’S focus on urban innovation, with a particular emphasis on how digital platforms can improve the lives of city dwellers internationally,” the organization stated in a release.

A highly respected but determinedly low-profile German museum director in charge of the Dresden state art collections is to succeed Neil MacGregor as director of the British Museum.

The surprise appointment of Hartwig Fischer, 53, has yet to be rubberstamped by Downing Street but sources at the British Museum suggested that would be little more than a formality. It means there should be a smooth transition between MacGregor’s official departure just before Christmas and Fischer’s appointment.

A year after establishing itself as Miami’s newest arts venue, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami has chosen a permanent director.

Ellen Salpeter, a longtime arts institution leader in New York who has served as deputy director of external affairs for the Jewish Museum in New York since 2012, will start her new position at ICA Miami on Dec. 1.

The Pérez Art Museum has picked Franklin Sirmans as its next director. He brings to the table fund-raising success, experience in four major U.S. markets (Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, at MoMA PS1 and the Brooklyn Museum, and Houston), a curatorial focus on contemporary art—and even art journalism experience as the former U.S. editor of Flash Art and Editor-in-Chief of ArtAsiaPacific.

He may need that varied bag of tricks to draw focus to the Pérez Museum (in any month but December, when Art Basel Miami Beach descends on the city), to boost its profile and attendance within the crazily museum-rich town and to raise both operating funds and its good will with the locals.

New Britain Museum of American Art on Friday named a director to succeed Douglas Hyland. Min Jung Kim, who will join the museum on Nov. 2, is currently deputy director for external relations of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum of Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Kim will be the sixth director of the 112-year-old museum. Hyland's last day will be Oct. 30, according to assistant curator Emily Misencik. He has been director of the museum for 16 years.

After a nine-month search, evaluating candidates from across the country and overseas, the High Museum of Art has chosen Randall Suffolk, currently the director of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla., to serve as the Atlanta museum’s new director, the AJC has learned exclusively.

Suffolk replaces Michael E. Shapiro, who for two decades led the High through enormous growth and dramatic change. Shapiro announced last October he would step down this summer. His last day at the High is Friday, July 31.