NEW YORK—Knoedler & Company has announced that its director and president, Ann Freedman, has resigned and will be replaced by Frank Del Deo. Freedman joined the gallery, which dates back to 1846, in 1978, serving as director of contemporary art before taking the helm of the company in 1994. Del Deo has worked with the gallery since 1999 and served as associate director and senior vice president. He also currently sits on the board of directors for the Brooklyn Rail. Knoedler & Co. represents work by Robert Motherwell, Jules Olitski, and Miton Avery, among others.

HOUSTON—On Oct. 21, Michelle White was named an associate curator at the Menil Collection in Houston. She has been with the collection since 2006, and formerly held the position of assistant curator. Her previous employment includes working as a curatorial assistant in the department of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and as an assistant at the Mongan Center for Prints and Drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Upcoming projects include a collaboration with Bernice Rose, chief curator of the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, on the exhibition “Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil”, which opens later this month.

MIAMI—The Miami Art Museum (MAM) has announced that Terry Riley has resigned from his position as the museum’s director. The resignation, which takes effect immediately, comes just days after the museum unveiled plans for its new building, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron. MAM officials say that the institution is currently ahead of its fundraising goals and that money has already been secured for the initial construction of the new building. Riley will reportedly return to his architectural practice, Kennen/Riley Architects, though he will continue to serve as a consultant with MAM through June 30, 2010.

Farewells

NEW YORK—The photographer Roy DeCarava, who kept a low profile in the art world despite pioneering a school of African-American photography, has died at the age of 89, the New York Times reports. Over seven decades, DeCarava turned his sensitive and tender documentary eye on subjects such as his native Harlem, capturing daily life there as an insider in works including The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes published in 1955. He was the first African-American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1952, and was celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996.

KENTFIELD, Calif.—Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect whose celebrated public spaced worked to respect nature and visitors’ freedom of movement, has died after complications from a fall, according to the New York Times. He was 93. The Brooklyn-born Halprin was inspired to become a designer after a 1939 visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, Taliesin East, in Wisconsin. Like Wright, Halprin strove to include nature in his designs for spaces that included Minneapolis’s Nicollet Mall, San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. (for which he meticulously handpicked 4,000 stones that composed part of the work), and a large plaza in Portland, which architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

BOSTON—Writer Robert Taylor died Sunday at the age of 84, reports the Boston Globe, where he worked as the chief art and book critic for many years. His death was attributed to injuries resulting a fall from earlier this month. He was known for his weekly column, "Bookmaking," which ran in the Globe from 1978 to 2000 and included listings, news, and opinions. In addition to his time at the Globe, Taylor reviewed film, classical music, and drama for the Boston Herald from 1948 to 1967 and was a professor at Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass., from 1961 to 1996. He was the author of four books, and was presented with by the New England chapter of the writers organization (PEN) with its Friend to Writers Award in 1989.