Richard Armstrong, the tall, easygoing 59-year-old who just became director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, has had a front-row seat for the comings and goings of the art world for three decades. While curator at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, from 1981 to 1992, he organized, among other shows, the biennials of 1987, 1989 and 1991. As director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, where he was based from 1992 until last month, he supervised exhibitions, including the prestigious Carnegie International surveys, in addition to overseeing acquisitions, gallery renovations and the endowment’s growth.

Raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Armstrong attended Paris’s École du Louvre and École des Étrangéres at age 20. Back in the United States, he graduated from Lake Forest College, in Illinois, where he studied with Franz Schulze, the architectural historian.

Now Armstrong has left what he calls the “coziness” of Pittsburgh for an art capital with an “endless capacity to absorb new talent” and for “a healthy institution with wonderful programming for the next few years.” The Guggenheim itself he praises for its ability to frame “work in a particular way because of the building’s give and take,” citing as examples its exhibitions devoted to Ellsworth Kelly and Jenny Holzer and “Picasso and the Age of Iron.”

Armstrong realizes that running a museum is easier when the staff feels empowered; more importantly, he knows how to make that happen. “[He] understands the strengths of everybody he works with and encourages them and allows them to fulfill their potential,” says the New Museum’s Laura Hoptman, who organized the 2004 Carnegie International under Armstrong. “It’s exhilarating.” 

"Upward Spiral" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.