Christina Nielsen, an 11-year vet of the Art Institute of Chicago, is coming east to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, reports the Boston Globe. Having served most recently in Chicago as the assistant curator of late antique and Byzantine art, Nielsen will assume the role of curator of the collection and director of program planning when she starts at the Gardner this month.
Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation is losing deputy director Judith F. Dolkart to the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, reports Artdaily. Dolkart has been with the Barnes since 2009, and will serve as director at the Addison. She replaces Brian T. Allen, who became become director of the New York Historical Society in December. The Barnes also saw former director Derek Gillman step down four months ago to become a visiting professor at the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University, also in Philadelphia.
As arnet News reported last week, former Sotheby’s chairman Amy Cappellazzo has partnered with art adviser Allan Schwartzman to form Art Agency Partners, which will advise collectors and foundations with acquisitions, sales, and long-term strategy.
The Dallas Museum of Art has named Shyam Oberoi as its new director of technology and digital media. Since 2006, Oberoi has been at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was a senior administrator in the Met’s digital media department.
After a year at New York’s Barbara Mathes Gallery, Charles Conkright has resigned from his role as co-director, a representative of the gallery confirms. Longtime director Jill Bishins is staying with the gallery.
Art and architecture publishing house Phaidon Press has a new CEO in Keith Fox, most recently the president of the construction division at McGraw Hill Financial, according to Gallerist.
Stefan Rormoser of Innsbruck, Armor for field and tilt, of Count Franz von Teuffenbach, detail.
Photo: courtesy the John Woodman Higgins Collection/Worcester Art Museum.
After acquiring the collection of Worcester, Massachusetts’s, Higgins Armory Museum, which shuttered at the end of 2013, the Worcester Art Museum has hired the Higgins’s former curator, Jeffrey Forgeng, as its first curator of arms and armor, and medieval art, reports Mass Live. Forgeng, who is also an adjunct associate professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, will assume his new post August 1. “Knights!” an exhibition based on the newly combined holdings of the two museums, debuted this weekend. The museum plans to have two floors permanently dedicated to displaying the Higgins collection in its entirety by 2020.
Mount Tremper Arts, an seven-year-old arts center in Phoenicia, New York, has appointed its first executive director, arts administrator Abigail Guay, reports Daily Freeman Business. Guay has previously worked at Grantmakers in the Arts and was the founding director of former Seattle-based artist residency and exhibition program Open Satellite.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has named Julia Reyes Taubman and Elyse Goldin Foltyn as co-chairs of the institution’s board, reports Artforum. Taubman, who helped found the museum and has served as the board’s chair for the last seven years, will manage creative operations, while Foltyn, on the board for three years and formerly the chief marketing officer of Munder Capital Management, will be responsible for nonprofit business priorities. The Detroit Free Press also reports that the museum has received a $1.5 million gift from Helmut and Candis Stern that will endow a newly created curatorial position in African art.
Following recent expansions, auction house Freeman’s has made three new hires, according to ArtfixDaily. Matthew S. Wilcox, formerly the company’s vice president of trusts and estates, is leaving his current position at Weschler’s Auctioneers & Appraisers in Washington, D.C., to oversee Freeman’s operations there and in the wider lower mid-Atlantic region. Decamping from Bonhams, Michael Larson joins Freeman’s as its new head of fine jewelry and watches and west coast representative, while insurance and auction world veteran William A. Rudd will represent Freeman’s in the Midwest.
Swedish auction house Bukowskis Auktioner AB will welcome Anna-Karin Laurell as its new CEO on August 1. Laurell, currently CEO of SalusAnsvar at the Folksam insurance company, replaces Michael Storåkers, who announced his intention to leave the company last fall. He had spent four years at the helm.
Art Recovery International has made several key appointments following the launch of its office in London, reports the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. Mark Maurice, a corporate and personal wealth preservation specialist, is the organization’s executive director; Dorit Straus will bring her 30 years’ experience in fine art insurance to her role as insurance industry adviser; Ariane Moser, formerly of ArtBanc International and the Art Loss Register, is the new associate director of client relations; and Alice Farren-Bradley, the associate director of recoveries, comes to Art Recovery International from the international Museum Security Network.
Mikkel Bogh has been named director of the National Gallery of Denmark by Marianne Jelved, the Danish minister of culture, reports Artdaily. Since 2005, Bogh has been rector of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art’s School of Visual Arts.