ITHACA, N.Y.—Dagmar Richter has been named chairwoman of the department of architecture at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning, reports the L.A. Times. She will begin on July 1, taking over for Mark Cruvellier, who has been serving as the department’s interim chair. Richter previous worked as a professor of architecture and urban design at UCLA and as the principal at DR_D, a design company based in Los Angeles and Berlin. In addition to teaching at UCLA since 1989, she has held teaching posts at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union, Columbia University, and the Art Academies in Berlin and in Stuttgart. Her work has been featured in two books: XYZ and Armed Surfaces.

NEW YORK—The nonprofit Artists Space has appointed Stefan Kalmár director, Artforum reports. Kalmár has led Germany’s Kunstverein München for the past four-plus years, organizing exhibitions such as “The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground 1978–1988” and a Liam Gillick retrospective, in collaboration with Witte de With, Kunsthalle Zurich, and the MCA Chicago. He also aided in the establishment and programming of Ludlow 38, a satellite space of the Goethe-Institut in New York.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.—The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) has announced that German-born sculpture expert Eike Schmidt will head its department of decorative arts and sculpture, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The position has been vacant for two years following Christopher Monkhouse’s departure in 2007. Schmidt will be leaving his job as director of European sculpture & works of art at Sotheby's London to oversee one of MIA’s largest departments. His previous employment includes serving as an associate curator at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles from 2006 to 2008, a curatorial research job at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and work at cultural institutions in Florence and Bologna, Italy.

BELLEVUE, Wash.— Mark Crawford has been named executive director and chief executive of the Bellevue Arts Museum, the Seattle Times reports. Crawford has been serving as the museum’s interim executive director since October 2008, before which he worked, variously, as the managing director of the Portland Center Stage, associate managing director at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, and as executive director at the Committee for Children in Seattle.

MILWAUKEE, Wis.—Raymond R. Krueger, a lawyer with the Midwestern law firm Michael Best & Friedrich, was elected president of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s board of trustees, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Krueger previously served as the chairman of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and is currently the chairman of the Milwaukee River Revitalization Council. He will succeed W. Kent Velde, president of Lakeview Equity Partners, as board president.

Farewells
VANCOUVER, B.C.—Canadian architect Arthur Erickson died on May 20 at the age of 84. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease, according to the New York Times. Erickson was generally considered Canada's most famous modernist architect, designing buildings around the world — from Canada's embassy in Washington, D.C., to the Napp Laboratories in Cambridge, as well as the Kuwait Oil Sector Complex in Kuwait City and the Kunlun Apartment Hotel Development in Beijing. His first major commission was designing the campus of Simon Fraser University in a Vancouver suburb with his partner at the time, Geoffrey Massey, in 1965. He designed the Canadian pavilion for Montreal's world fair two years later. Erickson strove to design buildings that blended with and grew out of their surrounding environments, as well as buildings with a human scale. He was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1992 but continued to practice.

SAN FRANCISCO—Bay Area sculptor, conceptual artist, and sometime architect David Ireland died May 17 at the age of 78. The cause was pneumonia, and he had been suffering several years from dementia, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. As an artist, Ireland worked with nontraditional materials like cement, disused furniture, and broken pieces of garden statuary. In 1975 he bought a Victorian house at 500 Capp St. in San Francisco, and his artistic practice was centered there. He bought a second house, at 65 Capp St., in 1979 and was hailed as an architect for structurally transforming it. The Oakland Museum of California organized a traveling retrospective of his work in 2004, and his art is in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.