After suffering an exodus of its top officials, Crystal Bridges has taken an major step towards rebuilding its ranks with today’s announcement that Margaret (Margi) Conrads will become the Bentonville museum’s director of curatorial affairs, effective next month.
Margi had impressed me with her knowledge and skill in 2009, when she gave me a tour of the new installation she had brilliantly orchestrated of the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s superb American art collection, which closely commingled paintings and decorative arts.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
At that time, I had noticed that an illustrious lender was the source of a striking landscape that was hanging temporarily in the “permanent” collection galleries:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The Arkansas museum displaying the collection assembled by Alice Walton didn’t open until 2011. Meanwhile, museums like the Nelson-Atkins benefited as temporary repositories of some of the Walmart heiress’ holdings. It would seem that Margi’s relationship with Alice goes back a ways.
Conrads comes to Crystal Bridges from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, where she became its first deputy director of art and research in September 2012. Before that, she was the Nelson-Atkins’ senior curator of American art. She was also on the curatorial team for the Metropolitan Museum’s landmark American Stories show of 2009, which included two Crystal Bridges loans.
Another new Crystal Bridges hire is Robin Groesbeck, who recently came on board as director of exhibitions and interpretive presentations. She was formerly senior director of exhibits and design at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco.
Photo courtesy of Crystal Bridges
So there’s life after Kevin Murphy, David Houston, Matt Dawson, Chris Crosman and Don Bacigalupi.