NEW YORK—The board of trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has unanimously approved the appointment of Richard Armstrong as the foundation's new director. Armstrong has been the director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh for the past 12 years, before which he was chief curator and curator of contemporary art there. From 1981 to 1992, he was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Armstrong announced his retirement from the Carnegie this past June and begins at the Guggenheim on November 4, where he will oversee the foundation, the New York flagship museum, and the satellite museums in Venice, Bilbao, Berlin, and Abu Dhabi. He succeeds Thomas Krens, who resigned as director of the Guggenheim in February after 20 years in the position.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Smithsonian's board of regents has voted to elect Patricia Q. Stonesifer the institution's new chairwoman of its board. She will take up the position in late January, succeeding Roger Sant, who has served as chairman of the board's executive committee since January, and whose position will be replaced by Stonesifer's. She is currently the senior adviser of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and stepped down as its chief executive officer this month. Stonesifer has been a member of the Smithsonian's board since 2001.

SEATTLE—The Frye Art Museum has appointed Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker its first Frye Foundation Scholar. Danzker is the former director of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, a position she held for 15 years, before which she was a curator and then director at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She will work as a senior consultant at the Frye, providing expertise and advice, curating exhibitions, making recommendations about acquisitions, and expanding the Frye's professional contacts.

PHILADELPHIA—Peter D. Barberie has been named the Philadelphia Museum of Art's curator of photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, in the department of prints, drawings, and photographs. Most recently, Barberie was a visiting lecturer in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University and in spring 2008 was the guest curator of "Close Encounters: Portraits of Artists and Writers by Irving Penn" at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. He also worked as a curatorial fellow in photography at the Philadelphia Museum from 2003 to 2007. He assumes the role on October 1.

Farewells
JOHNSTON, Iowa—Don Ultang, a pioneer in aerial photography, died on September 18 at the age of 91. Ultang was a photographer for the Des Moines Register who, having learned to fly through a government-financed civilian pilot program, would go out to take aerial pictures, letting go of the controls briefly to shoot. He and another Register photographer, John Robinson, also covered a football game between Drake University and Oklahoma A&M in October 1951, during which they both documented an unsportsmanlike, seemingly racially motivated assault on black football player Johnny Bright. The two men shared the Pulitzer Prize for their photos of the incident.