Marjetica Potrc Joins New York's New School

LOS ANGELES—The J. Paul Getty Museum has appointed John Giurini as its new assistant director for public affairs. Giurini comes from the J. Paul Getty Trust, where he served as assistant director of communications and special projects since 2005. He also worked as an independent communications consultant, and for three Los Angeles communications consulting firms. Giurini will spearhead the development of long-term strategies for building stronger local, national, and international awareness of the Getty and its collections, exhibitions, and special programs.

NEW YORK—Artist and architect Marjetica Potrc will serve as a fellow at The New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics for the 2007-08 academic year. The fellowship will support the creation of Potrc's latest work, an exploration of sustainability through the lens of water and its impact on major urban centers including New Orleans and New York City. The resulting project will be presented at an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans in January, as well as at a conference at The New School scheduled to take place in the spring of 2008. Potrc is a Slovenian artist and architect whose work has been exhibited extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York, and The Curve, Barbican Galleries in London, and the Sao Paolo and Venice biennales. She won the 2000 Hugo Boss Prize.

CHICAGO—Patricia Woodworth is leaving her position AS executive vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer at the Art Institute of Chicago to become the vice president and chief financial and operating officer at the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Chicago Tribune reports. Woodworth has been at the Art Institute since 2002 and is credited with cutting debt and expenses for the institution and instilling a discipline that helped improve both its bottom line and credit rating. She will join the Getty Trust on December 17.

Farewells
NEW YORK—The photographer Fred W. McDarrah died November 6 at his home in Greenwich Village, at the age of 81, the New York Times reports. McDarrah, a longtime photographer for the Village Voice and the consulting picture editor for the Voice at the time of his death, joined the newspaper in the mid-1950s as an ad salesman and later became the its staff photographer. Born in Brooklyn, “he famously shot a generation of young hopefuls who had come to New York to make their reputations—hopefuls named Kerouac and Warhol and Dylan and Joplin,” according to the Times. “Later the picture editor at the Voice, Mr. McDarrah was a mentor to a generation of fine young photographers, among them Sylvia Plachy.  Though Mr. McDarrah’s work often hung on gallery walls, critics considered him more photojournalist than artist, an assessment with which he cheerfully agreed.” Many of his photographs were published in book-length compilations. McDarrah also became known as a sort of talent agent who “rented out” Beatniks in the 1960s for appearances before school groups, photo shoots, meetings, and catered affairs in and around New York.

RIVERHEAD, N.Y.—Bradford Kelleher, who founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first full-fledged gift shop in the late 1940s, died on October 31 at the age of 87, the New York Times reports. He started his career at the museum as a sales manager and was named the museum’s publisher in 1972. He later became a vice president at the institution and continued to work as a consultant in an office at the Met after he stepped down in 1986. Kelleher worked at the Met for about 60 years, separating the museum’s information and sales departments, opening the Art and Book Shop, and helping forge the template for the entry by museums into the gift and book business. He oversaw the creation of countless tchotchkes, including the museum’s unofficial mascot, the Egyptian hippopotamus nicknamed William. Kelleher was born in Worcester, Mass. His studies at Yale were interrupted during World War II, when he served four years in Army intelligence, based in Washington, D.C. He returned and graduated from Yale in 1948, specializing in Far Eastern studies.

CANAAN, Conn.—Abram Lerner, the first director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, died October 31 at the age of 94, the New York Times reports. Lerner formed a friendship with the museum’s founder Joseph H. Hirshhorn in the 1950s when Lerner, a painter and art historian, was director of a Manhattan art gallery and Hirshhorn was a client. Lerner, who was born in Manhattan, supervised the transfer of more than 4,000 paintings and 1,600 pieces of sculpture to the Hirshhorn Museum as it rose on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and he served as director of the museum for 10 years. In addition to his work directing galleries and the Hirshhorn, Lerner also exhibited his own works, which the New York Times called “quiet and affectionate views of landscapes.”

FORTUNA, Calif.—Gallery owner and artist Hobart Brown died November 7 at the age of 74, the Associated Press reports. Brown, born in Oklahoma, moved to Los Angeles as a young boy. In 1969 in Ferndale, Calif., he founded the three-day Kinetic Sculpture Race, a tradition that expanded to other U.S. cities and as far away as Australia. In 1962, he opened Hobart Galleries in Eureka, Calif. His wire sculptures were shown in museums and collected by Ronald Reagan and Johnny Carson, among others.