WASHINGTON, D.C.—Eduardo Diaz has been appointed the new head of the Smithsonian Latino Center, the Washington Post reports. Diaz has been the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the largest Latino center in the country, since August 2005. He served as the director of San Antonio's Office of Cultural Affairs for 10 years before that. Diaz replaces Pilar O'Leary at the Smithsonian, who resigned in Feburary after an internal investigation revealed that she had abused her expense account and tried to direct a contract to a friend.

PURCHASE, N.Y.—The Neuberger Museum of Art has announced that Helaine Posner will be its new chief curator and deputy director of curatorial affairs. Posner was most recently an independent curator and adjunct curator at the American Federation of Arts in New York, before which she curated at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, as well as directed the University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She was co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale and has written extensively on art, including co-authoring the award-winning After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Posner starts work at the Neuberger on November 17.

ROCKLAND, Maine—Lora Urbanelli, the executive director of the Farnsworth Art Museum, will be stepping down in December, the Bangor Daily News reports. Urbanelli, who has led the Farnsworth since January 2006, is moving to the Montclair Art Museum to assume the directorship. She will stay at the Farnsworth until the end of December, at which time chief curator Michael Komanecky will take over as interim director.

PHOENIX—Sara Cochran will be the new curator of modern and contemporary art at the Phoenix Art Museum, the Arizona Republic reports. The position has been empty since 2006, when former curator Brady Roberts left. Cochran is currently an assistant curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; previously she worked at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

CLEVELAND—David Deming, president of the Cleveland Institute of Art, has announced he will retire from the college in two years, the Plain Dealer reports. Deming has worked at the institute since 1998 and has held academic posts in Cleveland and at the University of Texas at Austin since the 1970s. He is also a sculptor and plans in his retirement to devote himself full-time to art. Under his leadership, the Cleveland institute has transitioned from a five-year undergraduate program to a four-year one and launched plans for a $55 million expansion and consolidation of its campus.

Farewells
LOS ANGELES—Bestselling author Michael Chrichton died of cancer on November 4 at the age of 66. Chrichton was best known as the author of seminal science fiction works Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, as well as for creating the NBC TV series ER. But Chrichton was also a contemporary-art collector, close friend of artist Jasper Johns, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art board member since 2006, the Los Angeles Times reports. He authored the 1977 book Jasper Johns and organized the artist's 1977 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Three works from his collection — pieces by Johns, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Rauschenberg — are on temporary loan to LACMA and on view at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. MERRITT ISLAND, Fla.—Cecil Stoughton, the chief photographer for the Kennedy White House and the first official White House photographer, died on November 3 at the age of 88. In 1940, Stoughton enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was assigned to a photographer training program, which included stints in New York to study with Alfred Eisenstadt and Margaret Bourke-White, in Hollywood to learn motion-picture photography, and as a combat photographer. He was sent to photograph President Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, and at the suggestion of Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, Kennedy's military aid, became the in-house photographer for the president. Stoughton is best known for his iconic photo of President Lyndon Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One after Kennedy was assassinated. He stayed on with the Johnson administration until 1965, and in 1967, upon retiring from the Army, he became chief still photographer for the National Park Service.

SAN JUAN—Joel Weinstein, an art critic and chronicler of Puerto Rican art, died of lung cancer at the age of 62 on October 31, Artnet reports. Weinstein was born in Denver, went to school in Oregon, and eventually moved to Texas. He was a graphic designer and food critic as well as an arts writer. Weinstein wrote for the Austin American Statesman (1994–97) and the Dallas Morning News (1997–2000), and published the literary arts magazine Mississippi Mud from the 1970s to 1997. A tireless and often eccentric advocate of the Puerto Rican art scene, Weinstein wrote on the topic in his blog Rotund World.

NEW YORK—Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, the co-founder of the American painting and sculpture department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died two weeks ago of cancer, Artnet reports. Murphy, 82, joined the Met in 1949 and helped establish the department under the guidance of Robert Hale. In the 1970s, she became known for her New York salon, which brought together many important literary and art world figures. She edited the collected writings of the novelist William Gaddis, who was her companion for more than 20 years starting in the '70s, and a collected volume of her writing, Excerpts: from the Unpublished Files of Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, was published in July.

CHICAGO—Artist and curator Don Baum died on October 28 at the age of 86. Baum devoted himself to promoting Chicago's art scene by championing the work of up-and-coming local artists. He was also an artist himself who made assemblages that were often overtly political. He served as exhibitions director at the Hyde Park Art Center from 1956 to 1972, where he showed such artists as Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, and Gladys Nilsson. He taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Roosevelt University, serving also as chairman of Roosevelt's art department.