Whoa!! Moore College of Art and Design chief curator and gallery director Lorie Mertes is leaving town. She has been a bright spot at the Galleries at Moore and in Philadelphia. This from an email from Happy Fernandez:
With sadness, I have accepted the resignation of Lorie Mertes as Moore’s Director and Chief Curator of The Galleries. She is resigning to move to Raleigh, North Carolina, due to her husband’s exciting new job change during the latter part of February. I have immensely enjoyed working with Lorie over these past 3 years and highly respect her creativity, vision, and effective leadership of The Galleries.
The gallery became a freewheeling place under Mertes, who showed bicycles as art and design, fashion from Mary McFadden, bold print-making during Philagrafika 2010, photos by women photographers from Miami’s Scholl Collection, and portraits by the great Alice Neel. She brought in heavy hitters and mixed it up with Philadelphia artists–and they all looked great and provocative. Her installations of shows were sparkling, and when a flood struck right before an installation was to open, she herself wielded a mop because the show must go on! And it did.
Lucky Raleigh!!!
