NEW YORK—Klaus Biesenbach, the current chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art, has been appointed the director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, where he currently serves as chief curatorial adviser. Biesenbach succeeds Alanna Heiss, who founded the alternative art center in 1971 and ran it until 2008, when she resigned to create Art International Radio. P.S.1 became an affiliate of MoMA in 2000. During his tenure at MoMA, Biesenbach has focused on expanding the museum’s involvement in organizing and collecting performance art and curating a number of shows that received strong reviews from critics, including "Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)" and "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson." Before joining P.S.1 as curator in 1996, Biesenbach founded Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 1991.

PHILADELPHIA—The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) has named Gail Harrity as its new president. Harrity has worked as the museum’s chief operating officer since 1997 and served as the institution’s interim CEO during the 15-month search to replace the late Anne d’Harnoncourt as the museum’s director. Before joining the PMA, Harrity had held the position of deputy director of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She holds a BA from Boston University and an MBA in Public and Private Management from the Yale School of Management.

Farewells
CHICAGO—Maryanne Amacher, a sound artist whose compositions and architectural installations vigorously investigate the relationship between sound and space, died on Oct. 22. She was 66. According to the Chicago Reader, she had suffered a stroke earlier this month. Amacher studied composition with iconoclastic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and pursued graduate study in acoustics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before embarking on a career that explored the outer boundaries of the art and music worlds. Though she never achieved widespread fame, she collaborated with composers such as Alvin Curran and John Cage and was championed by sound art cognoscenti. In 2005, she won the Prix Ars Electronica, one of electronic music’s most prestigious awards, in the digital music category.

CHICAGO—Modernist sculptor Ruth Duckworth, who rose to fame on the success of her abstract ceramics, has died after a brief, unspecified illness, the Chicago Tribune reports. She was 90. Duckworth was born in Hamburg, Germany, though her family moved to England in 1936, where she attended art school in London and Liverpool. After experimenting with stone, metal, and wood, Duckworth eventually settled on ceramics as her medium of choice, crafting large public works for lobbies, airport terminals, and other public places, as well as smaller works that were shown in museums and galleries around the world. “I have terrible gas bills,” she once admitted. Duckworth is survived by a sister, Ilse Windmuller.

NEW YORK—Pioneering feminist artist Nancy Spero died at the New York University Hospital this weekend, Ed Winkleman reports. She was 83. Spero’s life was defined by an unceasing devotion to social justice issues which she confronted through both her artistic practice and political action. In 1969 she helped start the Art Workers Coalition and in 1972 was a founding member of A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) in SoHo, which was the first all-female cooperative gallery in America. After attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Spero studied painting in Paris. In the mid-1960s, she moved to New York with her husband, Leon Golub, who passed away in 2004. In 2006, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

LONDON—Conceptual artist David Troostwyk has died of lung cancer, the Guardian reports. After beginning a career in advertising, Troostwyk attended the St Albans School of Art and then the Royal College of Art. He went on to become a pioneer of  conceptual art throughout the 1960s and '70s, perhaps best known for his witty, oftentimes ironic pieces. His Our Famous Culture installation, for example, featured an audio recording of the artist insisting to a questioner that the washing machine is the supreme object of civilization. Despite critical accolades, Troostwyk was not a widely collected artist. The Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain each own one piece. He is survived by his partner, Barbara Cavanagh, and a daughter, Lois.