DC Heading to the Bronx

My friend and colleague Deborah Cullen, who for the past 6 years has been Director and Chief Curator of the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, has just been named the Executive Director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. ARTNEWS has written up a great piece on her new role, as has The New York Times. I've never actually been to this museum, I'm sorry to say, but over the past few years it has raised its profile and I am eager to visit because of some of the exhibitions on at present and opening soon. (My family, on my mother's side, is all of Bronx extraction, but I wonder if any of them had ever been to this museum before?) She lives in the Bronx with her husband, sculptor Arnaldo Morales, so it likely means a lot to the museum that she has been a resident in that NYC borough for quite some time now.

Deb and I are both alum of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, although she graduated about a decade before me so we only just met when I started at Columbia about a year after her. She is a major art critic and curator of the art of contemporary African-American, Caribbean, and Latinx artists; prior to role at Columbia, she worked at El Museo del Barrio. At Columbia, she successfully transitioned the Wallach Gallery to its gorgeous new space, a white-cube windowed gallery in the Lenfest Center for the Arts on 129th St. The inaugural show "Uptown" that she curated there, the first of what she has called a triennial, focused on NYC artists who work north of 99th St., so essentially the Harlem and Washington Heights area. The show was fantastic. She and I have served on each other's respective planning committees for the gallery and the permanent collection at Columbia, and she and I have worked together to secure some amazing new art work by contemporary artists in the permanent collection. John Pinderhughes, a fantastic Harlem-based photographer, was among those artists, and he took the photo of Deb you see at the top of this post. I'm thrilled for Deb as she moves onto this new position, but I will definitely miss working with her. Here's a selfie of us in Seattle in May 2014 when we attended together the annual conference of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.