Curators laid off: NYC, SF & Detroit - Front Page - art museum curators, New York City, San Francisco

Art in America, April, 2004

In shake-ups at three major art institutions, a number of high-profile curators have been laid off or have resigned to protest changes.

At New York's Whitney Museum, Marla Prather was let go in January. She had been on leave caring for a sick child. The news became public in a New York Times story about new director Adam Weinberg and his plans for the museum. Prather joined the Whitney staff as curator of postwar art in 2000, after 13 years at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. At the Whitney she organized the recent "Unrepentant Ego: The Self-Portraits of Lucas Samaras" and "An American Legacy, A Gift to New York."

According to the Times story and a similar report in the Art Newspaper, Weinberg, who took the helm last October, is working to eliminate the curatorial specialization by period or medium that was implemented by his predecessor, Maxwell Anderson, which resulted in the departures under similar circumstances of curators Thelma Golden and Elisabeth Sussman. Additional changes at the Whitney are reportedly forthcoming, but further details were not available as this issue went to press.

In mid-February, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts announced that longtime chief curator Renny Pritikin had been laid off, along with eight other staff members from various departments. Citing budgetary constraints brought on by a drop in revenue and the loss of a $400,000 annual grant from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund, executive director Ken Foster said that none of the positions will be filled. Foster, who last fall replaced former director John Killacky, will take on Pritikin's role, working with current visual arts curator Rene de Guzman and Berin Golonu, who joined the staff last July as assistant visual arts curator. Pritikin is known for his innovative programming, which included the launch in 1997 of a popular biennial survey of Bay Area artists. He will organize two exhibitions for the center next year, "Big Deal," featuring large-scale works, and a show about magician Ricky Jay.

And at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a restructuring undertaken last fall by director Graham Beal resulted in the folding of two departments into broader categories and the subsequent resignations by Egyptian art curator William H. Peck, his wife Elsie Holmes Peck, curator of Middle Eastern art, and Penelope Slough, associate curator of Greco-Roman art. The reorganization is part of the museum's renovation and expansion, scheduled for completion in 2006.