Musical chairs - curator changes at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1999

Musical chairs is being played by past and present curators at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art under the direction of Maxwell Anderson, former director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto who took over for David Ross, now director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in September 1998. But the transitional games have not been smooth, as chronicled almost daily as the events unfolded in The New York Times. In November, Anderson announced that he would reorganize the Whitney's curatorial structure with one senior curator and one curator heading each of seven departments (Prewar, Postwar, Contemporary, Photography, Film and Video, Prints and Drawings) and named six people from the existing staff to continue. In December Lisa Phillips, appointed as Contemporary curator, announced that she would not stay at the Whitney but would instead succeed Marcia Tucker as director of New York City's recently remodeled New Museum of Contemporary Art. Phillips had been at the Whitney for 23 years and had been involved in every Biennial exhibition from 1985 to 1993, becoming the Biennial's curator in 1997. Connie Wolf, former associate director for public programs at the Whitney, left New York to become the first director of San Francisco's new Jewish Museum.

Back at the Whitney, Eugenie Tsai, former associate curator and curator of Branches for the Whitney, replaced Adam Weinberg as senior curator. She is responsible for the development and programming of the permanent collection and will continue to curate exhibitions. Her previous projects such as "Lee Mingwei: Way Stations," "Gazing Back: Shigeko Kubota and Mary Lucier" and "Fact & Fiction: Photographs from the permanent collection" have placed a particular emphasis on photography, video and performance works. No longer are senior curators specialists in painting: Tsai's Ph.D. dissertation was on earthwork artist Robert Smithson.

Weinberg left his post as senior curator of the Whitney to serve as Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, replacing John M. "Jock" Reynolds, now director of the Yale University Art Gallery. Weinberg joined the Whitney in 1993 and helped establish the permanent photography collection. Although the Whitney was one of the last major New York City museums to create a photography collection, the Whitney now has over 15,000 photographs. Weinberg recently organized an exhibition of the work of Seton Smith, and assisted in the rehanging of the permanent collection. At the Addison, with its extensive artist-in-residence program, Weinberg sees his role as curator as being focused on efforts to exhibit the artist as well as the art. Three solo photography exhibits are scheduled for the next year for the work of Peter Sekaer, a contemporary of Walker Evans; Nathan Lyons; and Wendy Ewald, with a planned 20-year retrospective. With a collection of over 50,000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs at his disposal and his background in photography (Weinberg received an MFA in museum studies and photography history from the Visual Studies Workshop), there should be more such shows in the future.

Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney for the past year, has been appointed Film and Video curator of the permanent collection. This is a significant change in the museum structure - two months ago, the museum did not collect film or video. lies worked for nine years at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art where she organized shows of Louise Bourgeois, Gary Hill, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, as well as the exhibitions "Screen and Screen Again: Film and Art" and "Sign of the Times: Film and Video Installations." lies describes herself as "a general curator with a specialization in film and video," viewing art from a perspective that includes all the mediums working at a single given moment rather than focusing on a medium unto itself. lies is planning to show film and video within the context of the permanent collection, introducing more fluid boundaries between mediums. She plans to curate shows that map out the history of film and video, particularly the fertile period between 1965 and 1975, as well as the crossover between historical and contemporary film and silent film and contemporary work. Iles's presence has been integral to the acquisition of film and video works in their original medium as well as video documents of performances and of performative acts for the camera. Such an engaged film and video department is long overdue. The Whitney still seeks Photography and Contemporary curators.