Jewish Museum Picks Director From Art World

From Wall Street Journal: Jewish Museum Picks Director From Art World
The Jewish Museum has chosen Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, as its new director, succeeding Joan Rosenbaum, who is retiring after 30 years.

Following Ms. Rosenbaum’s long tenure, in which she reinforced the museum’s focus on Jewish history and culture, the selection of Ms. Gould, who has spent her career in contemporary art, reflects the desire of the Jewish Museum’s board to add more dynamism and fresh ideas to this 107-year-old institution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Robert A. Pruzan, the museum’s chairman, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Gould, who is to start in the fall, would bring “a tremendous amount of energy and vitality” as well as “current perspective on what one should be like to be successful in the future.”

In an interview Ms. Gould, 55, repeatedly praised the legacy of Ms. Rosenbaum, 68, while also suggesting that she would shake things up ever so gently by, for example, reinstalling the display of the permanent collection on the museum’s third and fourth floors, which has been unchanged for many years.

Ms. Gould imagines changing the presentation several times a year, she said, and sometimes giving a contemporary artist or architect the opportunity to comb through the collection — some 26,000 objects, including paintings, sculptures and ceremonial objects — and create an installation.

“Certainly the mission will not change,” Ms. Gould said of her plans, “but I do come from a contemporary background, and even the historical shows or exhibitions of Judaica” may reflect that.

She said she hoped to attract new and younger audiences by mounting exhibitions of architecture, design and fashion; showing more living artists; and deepening the museum’s ties to the Jewish Theological Seminary.

She also cited more practical goals, like recreating the museum’s Web site and improving its use of technology.

At the Institute of Contemporary Art, where Ms. Gould started in 1999, she has overseen an increase in the budget to $3.1 million, from $1 million, and has significantly expanded the exhibition program and staff. She has also strengthened the institute’s relationship to the university, creating two-year seminars for art history and writing students.

Ms. Gould organized the first museum surveys of artists like Lisa Yuskavage and Charles LeDray and mounted interdisciplinary exhibitions as well, like a retrospective of the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich housed in an installation by the architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au.

Before joining the Institute of Contemporary Art, Ms. Gould was the executive director of Artists Space in SoHo, from 1994 to 1999, and a curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

The Jewish Museum, which is dedicated, in the words of its mission statement, to “the artistic and cultural heritage of the Jewish people,” has vacillated somewhat between focusing on the artistic and the Jewish sides of that endeavor. In the 1960s it was known for daring exhibitions of contemporary art, much of it by non-Jews, including Jasper Johns’s first solo museum show and a landmark exhibition of Minimalism called “Primary Structures.”

Ms. Rosenbaum chose to re-emphasize the Jewish side of the museum’s identity, creating the permanent exhibition “Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey,” while also mounting shows of modern Jewish artists like Chaim Soutine and contemporary artists like Maira Kalman.

Ms. Gould said that she imagined her programming would be “a mixture of what went on in the ’60s and ’70s and what Joan Rosenbaum has done, which is really rooting it in the culture.”

With a $16 million budget, the Jewish Museum is significantly larger than the Institute of Contemporary Art. Asked why, after working exclusively in contemporary art, she was interested in running a specifically Jewish museum, Ms. Gould said she was drawn to the opportunity of working with an interdisciplinary collection, which includes everything from paintings by Édouard Vuillard and Lee Krasner to menorahs and other ritual objects.

Ms. Gould grew up in an interfaith home, with a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. She said she was attracted to the challenge of having to decide what it means “to be a Jewish museum today,” a complex question for which she has no definite answer yet. Ask her again in a year, she said, “and maybe I’ll be able to answer it.”