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Monday, November 13, 2006

TAM to Hire Another Curator

posted by on November 13 at 20:25 PM

On Friday, I wrote about the promotion of Rock Hushka to senior curator at Tacoma Art Museum.

I speculated:

For months after former chief curator Patricia McDonnell left, I kept hearing that TAM wouldn’t hire another chief, that Hushka would be in charge of curatorial administration, that he would be first among equals, or something like that. Sounded like hooey to me. According to the press release, Hushka will “take on the responsibilities of senior curator at the museum, and will retain his former title of Curator of Contemporary and Northwest Art.” That just sounds like a way of folding two jobs together, and I hate to see curatorial jobs dwindle. But maybe this is TAM’s way of saying it only needs one curator, and we’ll see what comes of it.

In fact, this is not TAM’s way of saying it only needs one curator. It will continue with its fruitful custom, going back to Barbara Johns and Greg Bell, of hosting the tensile interplay of two curatorial personalities. The museum will hire a junior curator in the spring, maybe a determined climber currently on a low rung at a major museum, says director Stephanie Stebich.

“This person will likely focus on aspects of modernism and not-Northwest artists,” according to Hushka, who specializes in contemporary art and the Northwest. The junior curator will answer to Stebich, not Hushka.

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