Photo by Sterrett Smith
David Levi Strauss
Museums shuffled staffs this week, with the Art Institute of Chicago, New York’s School of Visual Arts, and Milwaukee’s Charles Allis and Villa Terrace Art Museums welcoming new faces. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, along with the Wing Luke Asian Museum, saw the departures of their directors.
The art world also bid farewell to Edward Avedisian, Slovakian conceptual art pioneer Julius Koller, and Glasgow Boy Steven Campbell, who recently passed away.
Keep us up to date by sending the latest happenings to NewsEditors@artinfo.com.
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NEW YORK—The School of Visual Arts has appointed David Levi Strauss as chair of its MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department. Strauss, a writer and critic whose essays and reviews appear regularly in Artforum and Aperture, comes to SVA from Bard College, where he had been on the faculty since 2001.
SAN FRANCISCO—Denise Bradley, executive director of the Museum of the African Diaspora, resigned from her position, saying she was leaving to pursue “personal projects,” while another source told the San Francisco Chronicle that her departure followed "an end-game negotiation with the board." Bradley had been head of the museum, which is devoted to the origins, dispersal, and cultural legacy of African populations, since it opened two years ago. My goal was to lead and help establish the museum as a viable institution," Bradley told the newspaper. "I have accomplished that."
CHICAGO—The Art Institute of Chicago announced that Christopher Monkhouse, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts since 1995, will become curator and chair of European decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago effective Oct. 1. Monkhouse replaces Bruce Boucher, who since 2002 was curator of European decorative arts, sculpture, and ancient art. Boucher became curator of European sculpture last May.
SEATTLE—Ron Chew, executive director of the Wing Luke Asian Museum, announced plans to retire at the end of the year. Chew, a former journalist and self-taught curator who “turned a run-down museum into a nationally acclaimed institution for Asian history and culture,” according to the Seattle Times, said he had achieved all his goals for the museum during his 17-year tenure, and that he would return to writing. "It's time to move on and see what else is on the other side of the museum wall," he said.
MILWAUKEE—James Quirk, the former chief executive of Milwaukee Envelope Inc., has been appointed executive director of the Charles Allis and Villa Terrace Art Museums in Milwaukee. Quirk, who takes over on Sept. 13, replaces outgoing director Sarah Stauder. Quirk, who earned a bachelor's degree in art history from Carroll College in Waukesha in 1972, has both business and arts experience. He previously served as president and CEO of the now-closed envelope manufacturer Milwaukee Envelope, which he owned with his wife, Debbie Quirk. He also has served on the earlier European art acquisitions board at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the board of the Santa Fe Film Festival, and the board of the International Folk Art Museum, and as treasurer of the Friends of Folk Art foundation in Santa Fe.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Gail Andrews, executive director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, has been elected president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. The international organization maintains data on finances, staffing, and insurance, and addresses such issues as museum ethics. During her one-year term, Andrews is expected to tackle the issue of fair market value for works of art, with the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which would allow artists to claim fair deductions for art that is donated to museums and other organizations, currently before the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Farewells
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—The photographer Joe O’Donnell died last week in Nashville of complications from a stroke. He was 85.
O’Donnell was best known for the gripping World War II images he shot as a Marine in Japan and for the scenes of White House life he later captured as a presidential photographer. Among his most lasting work is the iconic image of the young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin.
PHILMONT, N.Y.—The painter Edward Avedisian died Aug. 17 at the age of 71. Avedisian was best known for his bold, "hotly colored but emotionally cool abstract painting that succeeded Abstract Expressionism in the early 1960s," according to the New York Times, and his most frequent motif was a grouping of seed-like orbs clustered near the center of a monochrome canvas. He was born in Lowell, Mass., studied art at the Boston Museum School, and had six solo shows in New York galleries, including two at the Robert Elkon Gallery, where he continued to be regularly featured in group shows through 1975. By the early 1960s, his work had appeared on the cover of Artforum, in the Op Art exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art, and in four annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His paintings were widely sought by both private collectors and major museums in New York and beyond.
STIRLING, Scotland—The artist Steven Campbell died at the age of 53 after suffering a ruptured appendix, BBC News reports. Campbell was one of the Glasgow Boys, a well-known group of artists who studied together at Glasgow School of Art. Campbell, whose work is in a number of public collections, spent seven years working as a steelworker before developing his art career. His time at the Glasgow School of Art was followed by a stint in New York as a Fulbright scholar. His early work took the form of installation and performance art, while his later pieces were paintings. He spent almost 10 years in a “self-imposed exile,” nearly giving up painting, before he returned to the scene five years ago, to mount a critically acclaimed show at Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery.
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia—The artist Julius Koller, the pioneer of conceptual art in the former Czechoslovakia and an eminent painter, graphic artist, and photographer has died aged 68, Agence France-Presse reports. Koller, born in May 1939 in Piestany, in western Slovakia, was among a band of artists from the former Czechoslovakia who strove to end the country's cultural isolation in the 1960s.
Koller invented something he called the “anti-happening”—presenting conceptual actions or objects taken from daily life—and founded an organization called U.F.O. (Universal Futurological Operations). His works appeared at several prestigious venues including the Venice Biennale, the Miro Foundation in Barcelona, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
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