David Travis to Retire from Art Institute of Chicago

Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

David Travis

Edna Andrade

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BONITA SPRINGS, Fla.—Roderick Jacobs has been named the CEO of Expoships, LLLP. Jacobs joins Expoships after serving as a senior executive with the Compass Group for more than 15 years. His initial focus will be the summer launch of Expoships's flagship, Seafair, which will exhibit and sell art and luxury goods. Jacobs assumes the position May 1. 

BOSTON—Jonathan Lee has been appointed the new chair of the Rose Art Museum board of directors at Brandeis University. Lee, who will serve a three-year term, first became a board member in 2005. He also serves on the boards of the Aspen Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lee has spent more than 20 years as a principal in corporate acquisitions and president of Lee Capital Investments, a private equity and investment banking firm in Boston.

EDINBURGH—Susan Rice has been named the chair of the Festivals Forum, a commission comprised of senior executives and political representatives from a number of Scottish organizations, set up to oversee the strategic development of Edinburgh's festivals. The chief executive of Lloyds TSB Scotland since 2000, Rice is the first woman to lead a U.K. clearing bank, and also serves as a director of Scottish and Southern Energy, Scotland's Futures Forum, and Scottish Business in the Community. She has chaired the Edinburgh International Book Festival since 2001.

CHICAGO—The Art Institute of Chicago has announced the retirement of David Travis, the chair of the department of photography, effective June 30. Travis has worked at the institute for 36 years, starting out as an assistant curator of photography in the department of prints and drawings in 1972. He curated more than 150 photography exhibitions at the institute, and guest curated exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other museums around the country. In 1987, the French government awarded him the Chevalier de l'Orde des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to the advanced awareness of French culture, and Chicago magazine named him a Chicagoan of the Year in 2002. A collection of his lectures and essays, titled At the Edge of Light: Thoughts on Photographers and Photography, on Talent and Genius, was published in 2003.

Farewells
SAN FRANCISCO—Ann Chamberlain, an artist famous for her collaborative installations, died of breast cancer on April 18. She was 56. One of Chamberlain's most famous installations was a three-story mural she created with artist Ann Hamilton for the new San Francisco Main Library in the 1990s wherein she papered the wall with 50,000 cards from the obsolete card catalog. She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and San Francisco State University, from which she also received two arts degrees. Among her honors were a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Fulbright fellowship. 

PHILADELPHIA—Edna Andrade, a leading Optical art painter, died on April 17 at the age of 91. Andrade began and ended her career as a a realist, but was most famous for her playful canvases of geometric abstraction. She had her first major solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1954 and began teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts), where she would teach for more than 30 years, in 1958. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts organized a major retrospective of her optical paintings in 2003, and her work is included in the collections of the academy, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.