LOS ANGELES—British curator Charlotte Cotton will return to her home country after a two-year stint in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reports. Cotton, currently head of the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been selected as the creative director of the planned London branch of the U.K.'s National Media Museum, located in Bradford, England. She will help establish the new space and shape its exhibition program. Among Cotton's achievements at LACMA was overseeing the acquisition of the Leonard and Marjorie Vernon Collection, which consists of some 3,500 prints. Before coming to Los Angeles, she organized projects in London and New York and was a curator for 12 years at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

NEW YORK—Scope art fair has announced the creation of its first curatorial committee, in place for this year's Scope Miami in December. Independent critic and curator David Hunt will serve as curatorial director and will be accompanied on the committee by four museum professionals: Franklin Sirmans, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston; Naomi Beckwith, assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Kate McNamara, curatorial assistant at P.S. 1/MoMA in New York; and Benjamin Godsill, curatorial associate at New York's New Museum. "It's a dynamic way to close the gap between traditional fair programming and that of museums," said Hunt of the committee.

ST. LOUIS—Marilu Knode has been named the new executive director of Laumeier Sculpture Park, Laumeier’s board of directors announced. Knode will assume her position on September 14, succeeding Glen Gentele, who directed the park from 2001 to 2008. Presently, she is associate director/head of research at F.A.R. (Future Arts Research) at Arizona State University, where she has organized art-related projects, performances, and panels, in addition to coordinating international research and promoting local artists. In St. Louis, she will also teach at the University of Missouri-St. Louis as a professor of modern and contemporary art.

NEW YORK— The Smithsonian Institution’s board of regents has appointed Stuart Bohart and Marissa Mayer to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s board of trustees. Bohart is the managing director of investment management at Morgan Stanley and also serves on the boards of the Smithsonian African Art Museum and the Investment Company Institute. Mayer is the vice president of search products and user experience at Google. She was recognized with the 2008 National Design Award for Corporate Achievement and in 2008, at age 33, became the youngest woman ever to be included on Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women list.

Farewells
NEW YORK—Twenty-seven-year-old artist Dash Snow died July 13 of a heroin overdose. Snow, something of a representative of the downtown New York scene, was known as much for his outlandish drug- and sex-filled lifestyle as for his art, which included graffiti when he was younger and then photography, collages, and artworks involving his own semen. A close friend of artists Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen, he was among the early artists of the now-defunct Rivington Arms gallery on the Lower East Side and went on to be represented by Peres Projects. Snow's work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, has been shown at galleries around the world, and is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He was the grandson of art collector and patron Christophe de Menil.

LOS ANGELES—Acclaimed architectural photographer Julius Shulman died July 15 at the age of 98, the Los Angeles Times reports. He had been in declining health. Shulman got his big break in 1936 when a chance meeting with architect Richard Neutra led to his photographing a home designed by Neutra. Shulman's work and reputation spread, and he was enlisted to photograph projects by a canon of modernist architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. He was "selling modernism" with his pictures, he once said. His most famous shot is of Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22, taken at sunset in May 1960 and showing two women sitting casually in a glass-boxed room that appears to float above Los Angeles. Shulman was awarded the American Institute of Architecture's Gold Medal for architectural photography in 1969 and continued to work into his late 90s.