Arts Seattle Art Museum Loses Curator
Good thing Michael Darling, SAM’s new curator of modern and contemporary art, starts July 1, because the only other person in that department, associate modern and contemporary curator Susan Rosenberg, is leaving the museum at the end of June.
Rosenberg is a New York native and a New Yorker at heart. After three years at SAM (preceded by some time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), she’ll return home, to a teaching position at St. John’s University, a private Catholic institution with five locations in the city. At SAM, she’s curated International Abstraction, Modern in America, and three of the exhibitions on view now at SAAM.
“We will miss the scholarly excellence of her work, her eloquence in speaking about works of art, and the graciousness and energy she brought to an enormous workload,” says Chiyo Ishikawa, SAM’s chief curator and deputy director of art.
Since you brought it up … enormous workloads indeed. The new SAM (opening 2007) will have double the space for modern and contemporary art than the current building, and then there’s the matter of the sculpture park, which opens this coming fall. What’s the plan for staff support over there? Will SAM bulk up but leave its new heavy weight on the same old number of staffers, from curators to PR workers? I haven’t heard of a plan for a round of new hires, and now with this …
I haven’t been keyed in long enough to know what exactly SAM loses when it loses Rosenberg, what is her particular creative imprint on the operation, which can be hard to determine with an associate curator, anyway. But I’ve enjoyed what seems to me like her dry, almost dark, sense of humor, and I’ll miss that.
In other news, and lest anyone think that Regina Hackett and I are actual nemeses, I’d like to point out a great piece she’s got in today’s P-I. It’s about Michael Knutson, the Portland painter I Blarted about in this week’s Stranger. I talked to him briefly at the gallery during his opening, but I didn’t work up to asking him how he lost his arm, and later I wished I had. Now I know what I missed: Regina has the amazing story, and another good anecdote about how all of Knutson’s early work burned down here.
Seattle boasts the world's richest man and the world's most embarassing art museum. Seattle Art Museum is and has always been embarassing. It's proof that affluence from technology industries and the trendy people it attracts creates brittle, empty public culture.
The last good museum built in this town was funded by a slaughterhouse owner. If you want an honest look at where Seattle Culture is today thanks to Microsoft, go to the EMP and look at impressionist paintings. It's dumb, rich, and tacky.