Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, stated he deliberate to retire from his position 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 revealed 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 superb 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 search 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 referred to as an “inequitable work surroundings 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 grow 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 variety effort amid industrywide requires change. The plan included guarantees to bolster insurance policies round reporting discrimination, and a brand new committee was charged with analyzing the establishment’s exhibitions and acquisitions by means of the lens of fairness and variety.
After one of many museum’s high directors, Nancy Spector, stepped down amid fees 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 carefully 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 government 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 usually did.
Armstrong additionally oversaw a very tumultuous interval a number of years in the past because the Guggenheim sought to develop abroad with a brand new museum in Abu Dhabi. The challenge was met with protests and calls for for assurances that the laborers can be paid and handled pretty, resulting in guarantees from Armstrong that the museum was deeply dedicated to labor points. The long-delayed challenge is scheduled to be accomplished in 2025, after Armstrong’s departure.
One other main change below Armstrong got here earlier this 12 months, when the Guggenheim quietly erased the Sackler identify from an schooling middle over the household’s ties to the opioid disaster.
“As a management workforce, we’ve got listened, discovered and tailored to fulfill the altering dynamics of our program, model, audiences, and funders,” Armstrong stated in an announcement. “I sit up for watching the Guggenheim neighborhood proceed to flourish and be a catalyst for ingenious pondering and transformative artwork experiences lengthy after my departure.”
