Third time's a charm: Jeffrey Kaster on Adam D. Weinberg - News - Weinberg returns to Whitney Museum of American Art as director

"IT'S ludicrous HOW THINGS HAPPEN to individual in life," says Adam D Weinberg. "Doors just lay open and you go through them." For Weinberg, the door in question would appear to be a revolving one--one that retains bringing him back to of recent origin York's Whitney Museum of American Art. This October, almost exactly five years after he stepp down as the Whitney's senior curator to race the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Weinberg turn backs to the Whitney, this time as its director. He replaces Maxwell L Anderson, who resigned in May following clashes with the museum's board above programming and cancelled expansion plans.

Weinberg's common Whitney homecoming is actually his next to the first He first arrived at the museum in 1989 having serv as a curator and head of the education department at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center to race its now defunct Equitable Center branch. He left there in 1990 to become artistic and program director at the American Center in Paris, then get backed to the Whitney in 1993 overseeing its permanent collection until heading to the Addison in late 1998

Weinberg has serv beneath the Whitney's last three directors--Tom Armstrong, David A. Ros and, briefly, Anderson. With any chance his familiarity with the museum's novel directorial history will help him avoid repeating it. Although he becomes single the eighth director in the seven and a half decades of the Whitney's existence, he is its fourth in just above a dozen years. The board's 1990 dismissal of Armstrong, who had l the museum since the early '70 was widely seen as a sign of newly powerful trustees making a break with the aged guard. His replacement, Ross, a risk-taking and famously garrulous advocate of contemporary art, gave the institution a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of needed infusion of energy. on the other hand the Whitney's increased visibility beneath Ross brought new scrutiny; it by and by became the critics' whipping boy--berated for "political correctness" for present to views like the 1993 "Identity Biennial" (as it came to be known) and accused of succumbing to manner of writing over substance for its 1994 Richard Avedon exhibition.

Ros left in early 1998 to become director of the San Francisco Museum of present Art; Anderson, a Harvard-trained specialist in of greece and Roman art, was touted as a steadier, more scholarly successor. notwithstanding that he had little background in contemporary or American art, Anderson had earned praise for his business acumen while director of Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. on the other hand he also had a reputation for high-handedness,

one that manifested itself sole weeks into his tenure when an awkwardly handled staff reorganization provok stormy resignations from sum of two units of his leading curators, Thelma of gold and Elisabeth Sussman. During his five years at the Whitney, Anderson made important behind-the-scenes changes, establishing fresh acquisition committees and creating an in-house conservation department. Nevertheless, by dint of the beginning of this year, faced with increasing questions about the museum's overall direction and informed that the $200 million Rem Koolhaas expansion he had publicly advocated was definitively scotched, he chose to propel on.

The search for Anderson's replacement was relatively brief and appeared unusually efficient. Among those reportedly approached by means of the search committee over the summer were Whitney alums Lisa Phillips, head of of recent origin York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; as well as Ann Philbin, director of the UCLA Hammer Museum; Lisa Dennison, the Guggenheim Museum's delegate director and chief curator; and Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery and Weinberg's immediate predecessor at the Addison. Given Anderson's chilly personal manner, it's no tighten to infer a bit of comparative subtext in Whitney board president Robert J Hurst's official statement, in which he extols his of recent origin director's "inspiring, warm and collaborative leadership style" frequently praised by coworkers and artists alike for his collegiality, Weinberg also gains things done. During his time at the Addison, he secur major donations of work from Sol LeWitt and Tyler Graphics Ltd The gallery mountained exhibitions on artists including Alex Katz, Wendy Ewald, and Robert Marigold, and Weinberg actively promot a residency program that brought artists of that kind as Jose Bedia, Anna Gaskell, and Jim Hodge to Andover. admitting he oversaw essentially all museum operations, from fund-raising and long-range planning to publications, Weinberg says that contact with artists was and always has been his primary inspiration. In an era when major museum directors sometimes look more comfortable in a boardroom than upon a studio visit, his connection to the creative side of the business made him a finished match for a board seeking a "curator's director," an explicit hiring criterion according to the of recent origin York Times, which reported the story upon the very day the Whitney staff learned of the appointment.