Randall Griffey Named Head Curator at Smithsonian

Randall Griffey, because 2013 a curator in the contemporary and present day artwork office of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is departing the establishment to serve as head curator of the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum in Washington, DC. Griffey not long ago cocurated, with Kelly Baum, the widely lauded Alice Neel exhibition “People Arrive First” at the Satisfied. All through his tenure there, he greatly enhanced the presence of functions by women and people today of colour in the museum’s collection and in its displays. In his new capacity at the Smithsonian, he will direct the museum’s curatorial program and will oversee a key reinstallation spanning 3 floors of the museum’s long-lasting assortment galleries.

Griffey is the second crucial player to exit the Met’s present day and modern department this year, with Sheena Wagstaff leaving before this thirty day period after serving as department chair for practically a 10 years. The departures arrive at a decisive second for the museum, which will soon begin a $500 million renovation of its modern-day and contemporary art wing.

“Randy is one particular of the most dynamic curators and influential scholars in the area of American art right now,” said Stephanie Stebich, the Smithsonian’s director. “He is known as an exceedingly generous colleague as nicely as an agent of institutional innovation. I am confident that he will be a transformative leader in making our collections, mounting defining exhibitions, and rethinking the narrative of American art by the national collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.”

When at the Achieved, Griffey curated “Reckoning with Modernism,” element of the musueum’s sesquicentennial exhibition “Making The Achieved, 1870–2020,” and collaborated with Cree artist Kent Monkman to make Monkman’s pathbreaking Great Corridor Fee mistikộsiwak (Wood Boat Men and women), a colossal diptych |kent%20monkman artforums|addressing the colonization| of North The us and considering the fact that acquired by the Met for its long lasting collection. Prior to arriving to the Achieved, he was a curator at the Mead Artwork Museum at Amherst School from 2008 to 2011, serving there as as head of curatorial affairs in 2012. Prior to that, he was curator of American artwork at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas Town, from 1999 to 2008.

Griffey replaces E. Carmen Ramos, who final year approved a task as chief curator of the Nationwide Gallery of Art, also in Washington, DC. He will believe his new part at the Smithsonian this summer.

ALL Pictures