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Monday, April 3, 2006

Seattle Art Museum Makes Big Hire

Posted by on April 3 at 16:35 PM

The Seattle Art Museum has hired Michael Darling, assistant curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, to be its next Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

I don’t know when he starts; the museum just made the announcement today to its staff, and hasn’t yet put out a release. (You heard it here first!)

This was a hotly anticipated hire for SAM. Contemporary curators work with living artists to establish a museum’s reputation at the forefront of artistic practice.

SAM’s former contemporary art curator, Lisa Corrin (who left to be director of the Williams College Museum of Art but is still working on the Olympic Sculpture Park) had a strong personality. She was also chief curator/deputy director of the museum, but that half of the job is now held by Chiyo Ishikawa, SAM’s longtime curator of collections and European painting and sculpture. Before Corrin was Trevor Fairbrother, who also made an impression in Seattle, and on behalf of the city in the museum world.

I have a call in to Darling, and I’ll soon find out more about him. I know only that he is a former art critic for the LA Weekly and that in Seattle, he’s best known for organizing local artist/architect Roy McMakin’s first museum exhibition, in 2002, called A Door Meant as Adornment, which opened in LA and came to the Henry Art Gallery here.

Painting in Tongues, a show of seven artists, each of whom is given an entire gallery at LA MoCA through the 17th of this month, is Darling’s doing.

Here’s one of the images from that show, Lucy McKenzie’s Deathwatch, a DVD projection and acrylic wall painting on concrete and fake brick wallpaper. (This is a detail.)

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More to come …


CommentsRSS icon

Aww, does this mean and end to ground-breaking exhibits like "Louis Comfort Tiffany, Master of Dull Decorative Art That Can't Possibly Offend Anyone".

I do rather enjoy the suspense of walking through an exhibit just waiting for a chance to exercise my CPR skills among the mostly octagenerian crowd.

Roy McMakin's design is pure dot com treacle. Whimsical-modern is best for Starbucks, a kid's room and, I guess, museum curators who aren't fit.
Big knobs for small drawers! Look! I'm an artist with the heart of child.

I think Roy did a great job with Westernbridge.

Westernbridge? Sure. Fine. Nothing to it.
I was refering more to his stuff that might be shown in a museum. But now that I think about it for a second the stairs are a lazy choke and the theater is all wrong (considering WB's focus). But the boxes are boxes that work (Except the little room with the dumb hole in the roof.)

Zelinski-
Consider yourself lucky that you're not in McM's neighborhood.
Just kidding Roy. You are a terrific guy in every way but I think you might be more happy someplace else.

then send him there. some think he is pure malice. ask his neighbors in madronna what they REALLY think of him....

that would be an amazing stranger article!

McM? Yes perfect. McDonald's restaurants are designed for lower and middle class children. McMakin's designs are for upper-middle class adult children. Awful stuff.

it's nice sam got someone from moca and so on but the real test will be if sam and its board actually let him do anything.

Oh fuck. More bullshit art talk.

Raw Data-it's a post about an arts institution. Did you think that the comments were going to be about something else? Duh.

I have no problem with art talk. I like art. Some of my best friends are artists.

It's art _business_ talk...the institutional gyrations and careerist bullshit I find excrutiatingly sad and pretentious.

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