The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is hiring a former Walker Art Center curator to head its new contemporary-art department. Elizabeth Armstrong, an award-winning California museum executive, also will become the institute's assistant director for exhibitions and programs starting in August.
The dual post is a first for the institute, which has never had a contemporary-art curator. Although it has acquired contemporary work sporadically, it generally ceded that field to the Walker Art Center. Armstrong, who is now deputy director at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Calif., worked at the Walker for 14 years during the 1980s and '90s. She is expected to strengthen cooperation between the two Minneapolis museums.
"Contemporary art is such a huge field that no one, two or five museums can encompass it," Armstrong said Monday from California. "I'd love to have a collaborative relationship with the Walker, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for sharing collections, exhibitions and programs."
This fall, for example, the institute and Walker will share a retrospective about the Modernist designs of Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Kaywin Feldman, the institute's director, said she was a "huge fan" of Armstrong's work, including "Ultrabaroque," a show of contemporary Latin American art that traveled to the Walker in 2002, and "Villa America," an exhibition of early-20th-century American art owned by Minneapolis collector Myron Kunin that the institute presented in 2005.
"The more venues that living artists have to show their work, the better for everybody involved," said Feldman, downplaying competition with the Walker.
Before joining the Orange County Museum in 2001, Armstrong was senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. She worked at the Walker from 1982 to 1996, rising from curatorial intern to curator.
Before that she worked at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, Calif., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. She earned an masters degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Hampshire College in Massachusetts.
MARY ABBE
