Chicago's Art Institute Names New Director

From The Wall Street Journal: Chicago's Art Institute Names New Director
The Art Institute of Chicago, one of the country's major encyclopedic museums and art schools, has hired a new president and director.

Douglas Druick, 66, a curator at the institute for the past quarter-century, has been serving as its interim leader since June. Mr. Druick succeeds James Cuno, who left earlier this year to join the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Mr. Druick, a native of Canada, has steadily climbed the institute's curatorial ranks, joining its prints and drawings department in 1985 and later helming its European painting and sculpture department, which spans medieval to modern art.

He is best known for organizing major surveys of Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. His acclaimed 2007 exhibit, "Jasper Johns: Gray," traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

His hiring comes as the institute, which gets 1.6 million visitors a year, continues to rebuild its $783 million endowment since recession. In June 2008, its endowment was $827 million.

In a statement, board chairman Tom Pritzker praised Mr. Druick's "experience, intellect and vision" and said the hiring reflects a greater effort by the board to hang onto the institute's top talent