Crystal Bridges Museum has will suffer yet another major departure with today’s announcement that its president (and, previously, founding director), Don Bacigalupi, will be heading to Chicago as the founding president of the planned Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, effective Jan. 15. He will remain on Crystal Bridges’ board.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
According to Crystal Bridges’ website, the Bentonville museum is still searching for people in “all levels of the Curatorial department including Curatorial Assistant, Assistant Curator, Associate Curator, and Curator.” (I had reported on the previous departures here.) I have a query in with Crystal Bridges to see if there’s any update on the job search information posted on its website. If I learn more, I’ll update here. Rod Bigelow, whose expertise is finance, not art, remains as executive director.
UPDATE: While I haven’t yet heard back from Crystal Bridges, I revisited its website, which has deleted the phrase, “all levels of the Curatorial department,” and lists these open positions: Assistant Curator, Assistant Preparator (temporary), Associate Curator/Curator [one person for both?], Preparation Intern (unpaid).
After a promising opening, Alice Walton‘s water-surrounded Arkansas art mecca appears to be floundering, notwithstanding its State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now exhibition (to Jan . 19), which has received more than 88,000 visitors since opening two months ago.
In another key staff departure at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, John Ravenal, its long-time (since 1998), consummate curator of modern and contemporary art, is deservedly stepping up to the directorship of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Ravenal was the fourth president of the Association of Art Museum Curators (2009-11) and a 2012 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (an indication of and a good preparation for his directorial ambitions).
Alex Nyerges, the VMFA’s accomplished director, who recently lost another key curator, Sylvia Yount, to a more high-profile position (curator in charge of Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing), today paid warm tribute to Ravenal:
We will miss his brilliant curatorial work, solid scholarship, advocacy for Virginia artists and creative and ever-constructive collegiality. The transformative success we as an art museum have undergone since our reopening in 2010 [my link, not his] has elevated the visibility of star curators such as John, and we wish him the very best.