Guggenheim’s Deputy Director Steps Down to Start Design Studio

The museum is now left with two empty curatorial positions.

Ari Wiseman. Photo courtesy Patrick McMullan.

The deputy director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York is stepping down, the New York Times reports. Ari Wiseman, who has served the post since 2010, is ditching the east coast entirely, and heading to Los Angeles to start an independent design studio with his brother, the designer David Wiseman.

Wiseman’s departure creates another hole in the museum’s administrative fabric, following the 2015 departure of Nancy Spector, who left the institution after nearly three decades as chief curator to take on the same title at the Brooklyn Museum.

During his six years with the Guggenheim, Wiseman oversaw strategic planning and acquisitions policies; launched the membership-based Collections Council acquisitions group, which has secured works such as Catherine Opie’s “Self-Portrait/Cutting” and Matthew Barney’s “CREMASTER 4”; and helped to manage the museum’s global network, including heading the now-scrapped Guggenheim Helsinki initiative, which was rejected by the Finnish capital’s city council twice, most recently in December 2016.

The younger Wiseman brother, an LA-based artist and designer who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003, has made a name for himself making nature-inspired design objects, installations, and lighting fixtures for private, corporate, and institutional clients.

His new design studio, in the Frogtown district of LA, is set to open in 2018, in a converted factory designed by Ted Porter of Ryall Porter Sheridan Architects. The 30,000-square-foot space will house a studio, as well as a gallery, and will host “programs that foster dialogue about design and nature.”

There is no word yet on Ari’s specific role in the studio.


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