Director of the Guggenheim to Step Down

Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, stated he deliberate to retire from his function subsequent 12 months, capping off greater than 14 years main the establishment and its worldwide offshoots.

Armstrong, 73, whose tenure included weathering the pandemic and responding to requires change round racial inequities, each internally and on the museum’s partitions, introduced the transfer in an interview with The Monetary Occasions that was printed on Friday.

“Someday subsequent spring,” he stated within the interview, “I’ll be leaving the museum. It’ll be virtually 15 years by then and that’s a very long time. The board is rejuvenated, and lively — it’s a great second.”

In a information launch, the museum stated that earlier than Armstrong steps down in 2023, he’ll work with its board of trustees to seek out his successor.

Underneath his management, Armstrong was tasked lately with responding to unionization efforts and an outcry over what members of the museum’s curatorial division known as an “inequitable work setting that permits racism, white supremacy, and different discriminatory practices.” Armstrong responded to the calls for for change by initiating conversations with the curators, saying that he noticed it as a chance to turn out to be a extra various and equitable group.

The museum later permitted a plan to deal with these complaints, making it one of many first main cultural organizations to offer particulars of an expanded range effort amid industrywide requires change. The plan included guarantees to bolster insurance policies round reporting discrimination, and a brand new committee was charged with inspecting the establishment’s exhibitions and acquisitions by means of the lens of fairness and variety.

After one of many museum’s prime directors, Nancy Spector, stepped down amid expenses of racism, the museum named Naomi Beckwith to succeed her, making her the establishment’s first Black deputy director and chief curator. (After a Black curator, Chaédria LaBouvier, accused Spector of racism, an impartial investigation concluded there was no proof that the curator had been “topic to adversarial remedy on the idea of her race.”) One other management shake-up adopted later that 12 months, when the billionaire collector J. Tomilson Hill was appointed as board chairman, and the author Claudia Rankine was elected its second ever Black feminine trustee. In an announcement together with the announcement, Hill stated Armstrong had guided the museum skillfully by means of the pandemic, calling him a “regular and inspiring presence.”

The announcement intently follows the information of a significant shift in management on the Metropolitan Museum, the place Daniel H. Weiss stated he’ll step down as president and chief govt in June 2023.

Armstrong turned director of the museum in 2008, succeeding Thomas Krens, an expansionist chief who remodeled the Guggenheim into a worldwide model with Guggenheim Bilbao. Armstrong got here from the Carnegie Museum of Artwork in Pittsburgh, which he led for a dozen years. Interviewed after he was named director, Armstrong stated he aimed to current reveals highlighting the work of younger artists, which he typically did.

Armstrong additionally oversaw a very tumultuous interval a number of years in the past because the Guggenheim sought to increase abroad with a brand new museum in Abu Dhabi. The venture was met with protests and calls for for assurances that the laborers could be paid and handled pretty, resulting in guarantees from Armstrong that the museum was deeply dedicated to labor points. The long-delayed venture is scheduled to be accomplished in 2025, after Armstrong’s departure.

One other main change beneath Armstrong got here earlier this 12 months, when the Guggenheim quietly erased the Sackler title from an schooling middle over the household’s ties to the opioid disaster.

“As a management group, we’ve got listened, realized and tailored to satisfy the altering dynamics of our program, model, audiences, and funders,” Armstrong stated in an announcement. “I stay up for watching the Guggenheim neighborhood proceed to flourish and be a catalyst for creative considering and transformative artwork experiences lengthy after my departure.”