Paola Antonelli Moves Up at MoMA

NEW YORK—The Museum of Modern Art has promoted Paola Antonelli to senior curator in its department of architecture and design. Antonelli joined the museum as associate curator in 1994, and had held the position of curator at MoMA since 2000. She has organized many exhibitions at the museum, including the upcoming “Just In: Recent Acquisitions from the Collection” (co-organized with Christian Larsen, opening December 21), and she is currently working on “Design and the Elastic Mind,” an exhibition on science, design, and innovation that will open at MoMA on February 24, 2008. She has also lectured worldwide on art and design and taught design history and theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts in New York. She earned the Smithsonian Institution's National Design Award in October 2006, and, in 2007, she was named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries by Time magazine.

PROVIDENCE—The Rhode Island School of Design has appointed John Maeda as its new president, the Associated Press reports. Maeda, who will become the institution's 16th president, is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and associate director of research at the MIT Media Lab. He has been a designer since 1990, and his work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Maeda replaces Roger Mandle, who has led the school for 15 years, and he takes over the position in June.

Farewells
NEW YORK—Theatrical animator Jack Zander died December 17 at the age of 99, the New York Times reports. Zander was “one of the last living artists from the heyday of Hollywood animation” and “was for decades after World War II one of the country’s most sought-after producers of animated commercials,” according to the Times. Zander’s Animation Parlour, his studio in New York, was dubbed “the Disney of the East” by those in the industry. Born in Kalamazoo, Mich., Zander moved with his family to Hollywood when he was a child and later studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now the California Institute of the Arts). Before starting his first studio, Pelican Films, and before moving into commercials, he worked at Warner Brothers and MGM, where he was the original animator of Jerry in the “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. He also served in the Army Signal Corps, creating animated training films during World War II. Zander made more than 5,000 commercials in his lifetime, including those for Gulf Oil, Camel cigarettes, the Dime Savings Bank, Alka-Seltzer, Green Giant vegetables, and Crest toothpaste.

NEW YORK—Artist and frame maker Robert M. Kulicke died December 14 at the age of 83, the New York Times reports. Kulicke, who was born in Philadelphia, was credited with modernizing frame design, and he also created reproduction frames for some of the world’s most famous paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Giotto’s Epiphany in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He opened Kulicke Frames in 1951. According to the Times, during a 1994 television profile on “Sunday Morning” on CBS, the correspondent Anthony Mason said that “the name Kulicke was like Kleenex in the frame world—a standard.” Kulicke also was a widely exhibited painter of small, delicate still-lifes; he considered painting his life’s work. He was a collector and seller of medieval art and Coptic textiles, and he served three years in the Army in the Pacific theater during World War II.

LONDON—Sir Norman Reid, who directed the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) from 1964 to 1979, died on December 17 at the age of 91, the Guardian reports. Born in London, Reid was trained as an artist but devoted his entire career—save for time spent serving in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders during World War II—to the Tate. He joined the Tate staff in 1946 and worked his way through the ranks of deputy director and keeper before becoming the institution’s director. He was responsible for setting up the conservation department, and he also used his friendships with artists to help acquire works. During his tenure, the museum saw the biggest expansion in the gallery's activities up to that time.

POERTMEIRION, Wales—The trend-setting British ceramics designer Susan Williams-Ellis died November 27 at the age of 89, the Los Angeles Times reports. Williams-Ellis founded the company Portmeirion Potteries in 1962. She changed the pottery world with her subtly counterculture designs, “defying conventional thinking, creating pieces that were made to mix and match, a once-novel concept that continues to sustain her pottery business more than three decades after it was founded,” according to the Times. Her “Botanic Garden” line incorporating more than 30 floral patterns debuted in 1972 and became a best-seller, and possibly the most successful tableware design in British ceramics in the postwar period, according to noted British ceramics designer David Queensberry. The line is still one of the most popular types of tableware sold in the United States. Born in Guildford, England, Williams-Ellis studied ceramics at Dartington Hall School near Totnes, England, and painting and sculpture at what is now Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. In addition to ceramics, she designed textiles, furniture, and jewelry, and she produced freelance book illustrations.