Smithsonian American Art Museum Hires Met’s Star Modern Art Curator – RisePEI

Randall Griffey, a curator within the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s trendy and up to date artwork division who has organized a string of acclaimed exhibits, has joined the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum in Washington, D.C., as its new head curator.

On the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum, the place he’ll start this summer season, Griffey will oversee a reinstallation of the establishment’s everlasting assortment galleries and supervise the curatorial workers. The lead curatorial position was most lately crammed by E. Carmen Ramos, who served as appearing chief curator and departed the establishment final yr to be chief curator of the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork.

Griffey joined the Met in 2013. Among the many exhibits he has organized there’s a well-received Alice Neel retrospective in 2020, which he co-curated with Kelly Baum. Different exhibits by him, similar to a 2019 Kent Monkman fee for the museum’s Nice Corridor and a 2017 survey of Marsden Hartley’s ties to Maine, have additionally earned reward.

Stephanie Stebich, the director of the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum, mentioned in a press release, “Randy is among the most dynamic curators and influential students within the discipline of American artwork right now.”

The deliberate reinstallation of the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum galleries is not going to be the primary undertaking of the kind that Griffey has over seen. In 2015, below the exhibition title “Reimagining Modernism: 1900–1950,” Griffey rehung the Met’s trendy artwork galleries to put varied types of modernism within the U.S. and Europe on equal footing, and introducing under-recognized figures like Hale Woodruff and Elizabeth Catlett within the course of.

“This shouldn’t be radical. It’s. At the least for New York,” New York Instances critic Roberta Smith wrote of Griffey’s rehang.

Griffey is the second main determine within the Met’s trendy and up to date artwork division to go away this yr. Final month, Sheena Wagstaff, the division’s chairman, left the Met after almost a decade in her publish. Throughout that point, she oversaw the Met’s now-defunct up to date artwork annex, the Met Breuer.

Each Griffey and Wagstaff have departed at a vital second, for the reason that division is gearing up for the deliberate constructing of a brand new $500 million wing for contemporary and up to date artwork.