Arts Seattle Art Museum Makes Big Hire
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.)
More to come …
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.