BOSTON—The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has appointed Edward Saywell as director of its West Wing contemporary art space. The West Wing will be updated as part of the museum’s expansion project, expected to be complete in 2010, and the new position is aimed at building on the West Wing’s existing visual art, education, film, and performance programs so that it becomes “one of the most lively, multifaceted contemporary art spaces in the United States,” according to a museum press release. Saywell joined the MFA in September 2006 as an assistant curator of prints and drawings. He also served as a curatorial associate of drawings at the Harvard University Art Museums for nine years.

PHILADELPHIA—The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has appointed two new leaders. Edward T. Lewis will become the institution’s president and chief executive officer, beginning on November 1, while David R. Brigham took over the post of director at the Academy Museum on October 15.

Lewis, a consultant to educational institutions for the past ten years, served as president of St. Mary’s College of Maryland and dean of Cornell University’s Graduate School of Business. He also has published numerous articles and poems in newspapers and magazines.

Brigham’s experience includes leading the Allentown Art Museum, where he helped raise more then $18 million for a major expansion project. He also has taught at the University of Southern California, George Mason University, and Lebanon Valley Academy.

DENVER—The Denver Art Museum has appointed Darrin Alfred as its new AIGA Assistant Curator of Graphic Design. Alfred, currently serving as assistant curator in the department of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, joins the Denver museum in November. In addition to curating DAM’s graphic design holdings, he will take charge of the 8,000-piece AIGA Design Archives.

LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has appointed Andrew M. Gordon as the new chairman of its board of trustees. Gordon, the head of Goldman Sachs & Co. Investment Banking Division West Region, has served on the museum board for the past two years and has a history of civic and cultural philanthropy, including serving on the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He also is the chairman of the board of the Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, Calif.

NEW YORK—The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has appointed Maggie Boepple as its new president. Boepple, who recently served for three years as senior adviser to London’s Commissioner of Transport, was also New York City’s chief lobbyist, the first woman ever appointed to that position, during the Koch administration.

NEW YORK—The James Graham & Sons gallery will move to a new location on the Upper East Side, at 32 E. 67th Street, in December. The gallery, which is currently located at 1014 Madison Avenue, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year and plans to inaugurate the new space with an exhibition featuring Paul Manship, Norman Bluhm, Walter Gay, Guy Pene du Bois, and other gallery artists.

NEW YORK—The Whitney Museum of American Art will close its branch in the Altria building at 120 Park Avenue when the Altria Group, which helped the museum pay for acquisitions and exhibitions, moves its headquarters out of New York to Richmond, Va., the New York Times reports. Altria listed the Park Avenue building for sale the week of October 8. The Whitney is not looking for a new location to replace the Altria branch. “It has been fabulous, but the branch museums are a thing of the past,” Whitney director Adam Weinberg told the Times. “They’ve pretty much run their course.” He said the museum does not have an exact date for the branch closing.

Farewells
MEMPHIS—The Memphis-based photojournalist Ernest Withers, best known for his images of the civil rights movement, died on October 16 at the age of 85, the New York Times reports. Withers’s “voluminous catalog of arresting black-and-white images illustrates a history of life in the segregated South in the 1950s and ’60s, from the civil rights movement to the Beale Street music scene,” according to the Times. Born in Memphis in 1922, he worked as an Army photographer during World War II and later opened a studio. He was also one of the first African-American police officers in Memphis. His work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, and has been featured in four books.

TOKYO—The Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa died October 12 in Tokyo at the age of 73, the Los Angeles Times reports. Kyoko, who designed structures that embraced different cultures, personalities, and abstract geometrical forms, was “one of postwar Japan's most influential architects whose legacy was a philosophy as much as a collection of buildings,” according to the Times. Some of his notable works include the replaceable pods of the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kuala Lumpur International Airport—which boasts a transplanted tropical rainforest integrated into a design based on abstract Islamic domes. Kurokawa also wrote extensively on theory and philosophy. He was born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1934.