RIDGEFIELD, Conn.—The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has appointed Mónica Ramírez-Montagut curator, Artforum reports. Ramírez-Montagut has served as assistant curator of architecture at the Guggenheim Museum since 2006. There she worked on such exhibitions as this year's "Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe" and 2006's "Zaha Hadid," which won the second-place award for best architecture or design show of the year from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

COLUMBUS, Ohio—The Wexner Center for the Arts announced the appointment of two new curators, Artforum reports. Catharina Manchanda joins the center as senior curator, coming from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in Saint Louis, and Christopher Bedford, currently assistant curator in the department of contemporary art at LACMA, will be a curator at the Wexner. Manchanda started at the center earlier this month; Bedford will begin in October.

OSLO—Allis Helleland, the head of Norway's National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, has announced that she is stepping down, the Norway Post reports. Helleland's time at the museum, which began in August 2007, has been marked by controversy. She has been criticized for purchasing works of art against the advice of museum experts and for not allowing staff members to speak to the press. Helleland directed Copenhagen's Statens Museum for Kunst for 13 years, from 1994 to 2007.

LONDON—Director Nicholas Serota has been made a "permanent employee" of the Tate, according to the Independent. Serota's contract was set to expire soon, but trustees decided at a July 9 meeting to renew it and make it permanent. Serota was appointed director of the Tate in 1988 on a seven-year contract, which was renewed in 1995 and 2002.

VICTORIA, British Columbia—Shirley Madill is leaving the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria to direct the Rodman Hall Arts Centre at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, the Victoria Times Colonist reports. Madill announced her decision yesterday after news of the resignation leaked last week. She has served as the director of the art gallery for less than two years, before which she was the vice president of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. She will stay in Victoria until November to assist in the search for a new director.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center has announced that Sam Gappmayer will be its new director, beginning in October, the Denver Post reports. Gappmayer is currently the executive director of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum, Idaho, where he has worked since 2002. He previously ran the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center from 1999 to 2002, the Fresno Art Museum from 1996 to 1999, and the Salt Lake Art Center from 1992 to 1996.

Farewells
NEW YORK—Painter George Deem died on August 11 from lung cancer. He was 75. Deem was fascinated with master painters and spent his career emulating their works, though with alterations. He would leave out certain details, add his own, or sometimes combine different parts of one master's work into a single painting. Critic Charles Molesworth called the technique "temporal collage." He wrote a number of books, including How to Paint a Vermeer: A Painter's History of Art and Art School, and at his death was working on pieces to be shown at New York's Pavel Zoubok Gallery in January.

LEUCADIA, Calif.—Manny Farber, painter and film critic, died at age 91 on August 18. As a painter, Farber began as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1960s and moved toward a unique style of still life — often showing objects from a bird's-eye view — in the 1970s and '80s. As a critic, Farber championed early American B movies, eschewing Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock for genre directors like Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh. He became the film critic for The New Republic in 1942, then for The Nation in the late 1940s, and later wrote on film for Commentary, Artforum, Film Culture, and a slew of other publications. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego organized a retrospective of his art in 2003, which traveled to the Austin Museum of Art and P.S.1. His work is included in the collections of a number of major art museums, including LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum.

NEW YORK—Artist Paul Edlin died on August 16, apparently from a heart attack, Artforum reports. Edlin, who was born in 1931, was known for his collages made from tiny pieces of postage stamps. His work has received a lot of attention over the past 10 years — during which time he also battled cancer — culminating in a 2007 solo show at the Longyear Museum at Colgate University. His works are part of the collections of Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and Musée de la Communication in Bern. According to an announcement by Andrew Edlin Gallery, Paul was part of the reason that Andrew, Paul's nephew, founded the gallery.

LONDON—Art historian Michael Baxandall died on August 12 at the age of 74. One of the most influential art historians of the latter half of the 20th century, Baxandall is largely credited with introducing ideas about language and rhetoric into and broadening the context for the study of works of art. He worked at the Warburg Institute for much of his life, beginning there in 1958 in the photographic collection. In 1961 he moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum as assistant keeper in the department of architecture and sculpture, but returned to the Warburg in 1965. His first two books, Giotto and the Orators (1971) and Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), established him as a major intellectual figure. Among his many distinctions are the Mitchell Prize for art history, which he received for his book The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, and a MacArthur Foundation award. Baxandall suffered increasingly from Parkinson's disease in the later years of his life.

SAN MARINO, Calif.—George Boone, an orthodontist turned real estate developer and a major Southern California philanthropist, died on August 12 of Parkinson's disease. Boone, 85, donated to many organizations in support of education and the arts. He and his wife, MaryLou, made their first major donation in 1983, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The couple was also responsible for the creation of the museum's interactive Boone Children's Gallery. In 1999, the Boone Sculpture Garden was unveiled at Pasadena City College, and in 2000, the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino opened as a venue for temporary art exhibitions. Most recently, in March, the University of Southern California dedicated the George and MaryLou Boone Center for Science and Environmental Leadership, which the university calls a "Camp David for the environment."