Carnegie, New Museum, Walker musical chairs

DOUGLAS FOGLE APPOINTED CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART said the press release I got last night from the Carnegie Museum. What? Where’s Laura Hoptman, who did the last Carnegie International? I thought she was Curator of Contemporary Art.

Hoptman’s on to unspecified new things. The press release doesn’t mention where she’ll be after the summer. The world of museum curating is a restless place and the Carnegie International seems to be a springboard. The last Carnegie International (1999/2000) was organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn and she pretty quickly left Pittsburgh to be senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco MoMA. Hmmm, San Francisco or Pittsburgh. I wonder how that figures in to curating decisions.

Quoting from the CM release:

Fogle will organize the 55th Carnegie International, which will open in May 2008. Fogle, who is currently curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will assume his duties summer, 2005….

Fogle began his association with Walker Art Center in 1994 as a visual arts intern. In 1995, he was promoted to curatorial assistant, then assistant curator in 1997, associate curator in 2000, and curator in 2003….

Fogle received his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1986; he began his doctoral studies in the history of consciousness with an emphasis on contemporary visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1987 and advanced to candidacy in 1991. He was a lecturer in the Art History Board at the museum from 1992-1994. Fogle has also written for several exhibition catalogues and journals such as Artforum, frieze, Flash Art, and Parkett.

Fogle succeeds Laura Hoptman as the museum’s contemporary art curator.

So this morning I noticed at artforum that not only is Fogle leaving the Walker for the Carnegie but Walker’s Chief Curator Richard Flood is leaving the Walker for the New Museum. Here’s the artforum link to the story from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

And here’s the lead of that story:

Walker Art Center’s deputy director and a top curator said Friday that they are quitting for new jobs in New York and Pittsburgh. Their departures, effective later this summer, are part of a brain drain that leaves the contemporary art museum with four key posts to fill less than two months after opening a $70 million addition for which it is still raising money.

Richard Flood, 62, the Walker’s deputy director and chief curator, will be chief curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York starting in September. Curator Douglas Fogle, 41, will become curator of contemporary art and organizer of international expositions at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art in August.

Things are highly fluid in the museum world, I’d say. And today, of course, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hits the front page with a story about a $500 million expansion plan…including, and here’s the news all you art lovers, a 400-car underground parking garage. Can we say new revenue stream everyone? Read the Inquirer story by Peter Dobrin and Inga Saffron.