Randall Griffey Named Head Curator at Smithsonian
Randall Griffey, since 2013 a curator within the up to date and trendy artwork division of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, is departing the establishment to function head curator of the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum in Washington, DC. Griffey lately cocurated, with Kelly Baum, the broadly lauded Alice Neel exhibition “Folks Come First” on the Met. Throughout his tenure there, he significantly elevated the presence of works by girls and other people of coloration within the museum’s assortment and in its shows. In his new capability on the Smithsonian, he’ll lead the museum’s curatorial program and can oversee a serious reinstallation spanning three flooring of the museum’s everlasting assortment galleries.
Griffey is the second key participant to exit the Met’s trendy and up to date division this 12 months, with Sheena Wagstaff leaving earlier this month after serving as division chair for almost a decade. The departures come at a decisive second for the museum, which can quickly start a $500 million renovation of its trendy and up to date artwork wing.
“Randy is without doubt one of the most dynamic curators and influential students within the discipline of American artwork at the moment,” stated Stephanie Stebich, the Smithsonian’s director. “He is named an exceedingly beneficiant colleague in addition to an agent of institutional innovation. I’m assured that he shall be a transformative chief in constructing our collections, mounting defining exhibitions, and rethinking the narrative of American artwork by way of the nationwide collections of the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum.”
Whereas on the Met, Griffey curated “Reckoning with Modernism,” a part of the musueum’s sesquicentennial exhibition “Making The Met, 1870–2020,” and collaborated with Cree artist Kent Monkman to supply Monkman’s pathbreaking Nice Corridor Fee mistikộsiwak (Picket Boat Folks), a colossal diptych |kentpercent20monkman artforums|addressing the colonization| of North America and since acquired by the Met for its everlasting assortment. Earlier than arriving to the Met, he was a curator on the Mead Artwork Museum at Amherst School from 2008 to 2011, serving there as as head of curatorial affairs in 2012. Previous to that, he was curator of American artwork on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Artwork in Kansas Metropolis, from 1999 to 2008.
Griffey replaces E. Carmen Ramos, who final 12 months accepted a job as chief curator of the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, additionally in Washington, DC. He’ll assume his new function on the Smithsonian this summer season.
