HUNTINGTON, N.Y.—The Heckscher Museum of Art has named Judith A. Jedlicka to the post of interim executive director. Jedlicka previously served as president of the Business Committee for the Arts, a group founded by philanthropist David Rockefeller to generate support for arts initiatives from businesses. She is also the founder of Arts & Culture, an arts consulting group. The Heckscher has struggled in recent years, downscaling a planned expansion after being unable to generate sufficient funds to finance the project. In 2005, the museum’s attempt to sell George Grosz’s Eclipse of the Sun (1926) from its collection to help fund the expansion generated public outcry. It eventually abandoned plans for the sale to an anonymous collector, which would have generated $19 million.

PHILADELPHIA—David R. Brigham will succeed Dr. Edward T. Lewis as the new president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, effective Jan. 1, the Philadelphia Business Journal reports. Brigham ascends to his new post from within: Previously the museum’s director, he joined the PAFA from the Allentown Art Museum in 2007, and before that, he worked as a director and curator at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. He has also taught at the University of Southern California, George Mason University, and Lebanon Valley College.

NEW YORK—Former Royal Academy of Arts Director David Gordon will launch a new company, called Gordon Advisory, aimed at helping arts institutions in the organization and governance of their businesses, ArtDaily reports. The new company has already taken on a number of projects, including working on finance matters with the Tate Modern and assisting in business planning for the High Line park in New York City. Gordon has been a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors and also served on its Public Affairs Committee; he previously was director of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Farewells
NEW YORK—Irving Penn, the former Vogue photographer who spent much of his career chronicling the famous and fashionable, died at his home on the morning of Oct. 7, the New York Times reports. He was 92. Though trained as a painter, Penn spent the majority of his career — 40 years — creating portraits and still lifes for Vogue, 150 of which appeared on the magazine’s cover. Penn’s photographs were marked by a kind of stillness that gave his work a timeless feel over the changing decades of his working years. He is also credited with bringing back into popularity in the late 20th century a turn-of-the-century process of developing film via the use of platinum. Penn’s work was displayed not only in the pages of fashion magazines — Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair among them — but in major museums as well. The 1970s saw his work exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, though he continued to be active in later years. His most recent exhibition was at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in September.

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Suzanne Fiol, photographer and founder of art and performance space Issue Project Room, succumbed to cancer on Oct. 5, the Brooklyn Paper reports. She was 49 years old. Fiol got her start studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pratt Institute, and later went on to direct a number of New York galleries before launching photo agency Issue Management, which represents artists like Jack Pierson, Mitch Epstein, and Marilyn Minter. In 2003 she created Issue Project Room as a center for experimental music. Fiol’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

NEW YORK—Photographer Nat Finkelstein has died at age 76, Artnet reports. The Brooklyn-born artist was best known for his collaborations with Andy Warhol: Finkelstein documented Warhol’s Factory from 1964 to 1967 and wrote a book with the artist, The Andy Warhol Index, 1968. His other books included Girlfriends in 1991, Merry Monsters in 1993, and Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967 in 2000. Though he retired from photography in 1968, Finkelstein exhibited his work up until a few years ago, with shows at the Tate Modern in 2000 and the Cracow Institute of Art in 2004.