CHICAGO—Madeleine Grynsztejn is leaving her position as senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to direct the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She will take the reins of the museum in the spring, becoming its first woman director, succeeding Robert Fitzpatrick, who resigned in March. Before joining SFMOMA, Grynsztejn worked at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

CLEVELAND—The Cleveland Museum of Art has hired Paola Morsiani as its new curator of contemporary art. Originally from Vicenza, Italy, Morsiani currently is the senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, where she has served for eight years. She also has worked at the Queens Museum of Art in New York and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Her move means that her husband, the artist Luca Buvoli, will establish a studio in Cleveland, where he will work part-time while maintaining his studio in New York's East Village, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Cleveland museum also has hired Cindy Fink as its new director of marketing and communications.

AUSTIN, Texas—Julie Thornton has been appointed board president for Arthouse Texas contemporary arts center. Thornton is a native Texan, former ballet dancer, philanthropist, and contemporary art collector. She is also a member of the leadership committee for the city’s cultural planning project, Create Austin.

TROY, N.Y.—The Arts Center of the Capital Region has named Amy Williams as its new president and executive director. Williams will be returning to the center after two years away; she served as its vice president for 20 years before moving on to her current position as executive director of the New York State Alliance for Arts Education in 2005. Williams, who takes over the position on January 2, succeeding Deidre Healy, said she plans to explore new programming opportunities and establish new artists’ residencies. In addition to Williams’s appointment, the center also announced that it is forming a new advisory council composed of board leaders and friends of the organization spanning more than 20 years.

Farewells
LOS ANGELES—Leonard Vernon, an industrial developer and one of the country’s leading private collectors of photography, died October 25 at the age of 89 after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease, the Los Angeles Times reports. Along with his wife, Marjorie (who died in 1998), Vernon started acquiring photographs in 1976 and built an archive of 4,000 images spanning from the 1840s to the present and including works from more than 700 photographers. Images from the couple’s collection have appeared everywhere from Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Vernon served a weatherman in the Army Air Forces during World War II before beginning his career as a developer.