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.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Aldus Higgins Chapin, 78, died of heart and respiratory failure on May 15, the Washington Post reports. Chapin was a former associate dean at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a case officer for the CIA. He became executive director of Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery in 1968, a time of transition for the museum and its accompanying school. Chapin worked to broaden the museum’s constituency and ease the tension between the Corcoran School of Art’s administration and students and faculty. He helped found the United Arts Organization of Greater Washington in 1972 and also served as president of the Washington Performing Arts Society and president of the board of the Washington Ballet.

NEW YORK—Artist Philip Stein died at his home in Manhattan on April 27 at the age of 90, the New York Times reports. A former assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros, the famous Mexican muralist, Stein was known for his own murals containing large-scale figures and bright colors. As a young adult he worked a variety of jobs, including being a steel plant worker, an army weather forecaster, and a set designer at Columbia Pictures. In 1947 he went to study art at San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, where Siqueiros had just been invited to serve as an artist in residence. Over the next decade the two worked together on nearly a dozen murals throughout Mexico City. In 1958 Stein returned to the United States and exhibited his Mexican-influenced artwork. In 1968 he completed his most famous piece, an untitled mural on the curved back wall of the jazz club the Village Vanguard in New York's Greenwich Village (the work has been referred to as New Man, New Woman). Painted on canvas, it depicts a man and woman in front of a multicolored background of vibrant geometric shapes.