FORT WORTH, Tex.—The Kimbell Art Museum has named Eric McCauley Lee as its next director, the New York Times reports. Lee replaces former director Timothy Potts, who led the museum from 1998 to 2007, leaving to run the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. Lee served as director of the Taft Museum in Cincinnati for the past two years and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma for the previous decade. He will begin at the Kimbell in spring 2009.

HOUSTON—Claudia Schmuckli, chief curator at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, was recently named the gallery’s new director, reports Artnet. Schmuckli succeeds Terrie Sultan, who was named director of the Parrish Museum in Southampton, N.Y. last year. Previously, Schmuckli worked as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She joined the Blaffer in 2004 as director of public relations and membership and was named curator in 2006.

PORTLAND, Maine—The Portland Museum of Art has named Mark Bessire the new director of the museum. Since 2003, Bessire has run the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine; he was also a lecturer in the humanities at the college and a chair of its committee on public art. Before that, he served as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art in Portland from 1998 to 2003. Bessire has also authored a number of books; his latest, Stairway to Heaven: From Chinese Streets to Monuments and Skyscrapers, will be published by the University Press of New England this year.

ALBERTA, Canada—Jeffrey Spalding has stepped down as CEO and president of Calgary's Glenbow Museum, reports the Globe and Mail. Spalding’s abrupt resignation came barely 13 months after his original appointment. This was, in fact, Spalding’s second run at the Glenbow: He served as the museum’s chief curator of art for two years starting in 1978. Before his most recent tenure there, he was the director and chief curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia for five years. The Glenbow has been quick to respond, naming Kirstin Evenden, formally vice president of access, collections, and exhibits, as its new CEO within hours of Spalding’s departure.

Farewells
PHILADELPHIA—American painter Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep on January 16 at the age of 91, reports Bloomberg. Wyeth was among the country's most celebrated living artists, although his realist, figurative paintings of rural life in Pennsylvania and Maine split critical opinion at a time when Abstract Expressionism was at the fore. Wyeth had his first solo gallery exhibition at William Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937; he went on to have solo shows at museums around the country and the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his 1976–77 exhibition was the institution's first devoted to a living artist. He painted his most famous work, Christina's World, in 1948; the picture was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art for $1,800 the same year. He was honored by Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and George W. Bush.

KAUAI, Hawaii—Hawaii-born, Chicago-based artist Ray Yoshida died of cancer on January 10 at the age of 78, reports the New York Times. Yoshida was a member of the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists popular in Chicago in the 1960s who were notable for their lack of involvement with the New York art world. The Imagists favored a style that involved surrealism, fantasy, and humor. Yoshida started out making collages from comic book clippings before switching to painting cartoonish, highly stylized figures in various settings; in the early 1990s, he returned to comic image collages. He began teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959 and remained there into the early 2000s; artists Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, and Christina Ramberg were among his students. Yoshida had his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Middle Hall Gallery in Rockford, Ill.; in 1998, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu organized a traveling retrospective of his work. He moved from Chicago back to Hawaii in 2006.