The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell has announced Tuesday that Daniel Brodsky and his wife Estrellita B. Brodsky have provided a generous endowment for two new curatorships in the Met’s department of modern and contemporary art. The positions—the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art and the Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design—will call for curators specializing in the art of 20th- and 21st-century Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, as well as design, including responsibility for the department’s holdings of architecture- and design-related materials.

These additions to its curatorial staff will lend major support to the Met’s immanent expansion into the Whitney Museum’s longtime building on Madison Avenue, designed by Marcel Breuer, which will be vacated in 2015. Under the leadership of Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s chairman of modern and contemporary art, the two new curators will work closely with the museum’s modern and contemporary curatorial team, researching and developing the Met’s existing collections, as well as devising programs suited for exhibition in the new space.

“Developing our program for the expanded space in which modern and contemporary art will be displayed is a challenge and inspiration for our curators,” Campbell said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “We look forward to providing the public with a global representation of the art of our time, set within the context of the Met’s unparalleled encyclopedic collection… It is also worth noting that the architecture and design curatorship is a new position for the Met, casting fresh light on an area of scholarship and increasing public interest that affects us profoundly in our day-to-day lives.”

—Jeffrey Grunthaner

(Photo courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Facebook.)