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Katonah Museum of Art names Darsie Alexander as Executive Director

The Katonah Museum of Art (KMA) announced the appointment of its new Executive Director, Darsie Alexander. She leaves her current position as Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to assume her new role at the KMA on March 1, 2014.

Ms. Alexander has a proven track record of producing multi-disciplinary exhibitions that are significant for their artistic merit and great fun to experience. People still talk about the interactive sculpture exhibition, Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof, presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art and, more recently, the Walker’s Benches & Binoculars, where visitors sat on chaise lounges and leaned back with binoculars, to look at the works mounted high on the walls. She also orchestrated the purchase of one of the Walker’s most important acquisitions: the 3,000-object Merce Cunningham Dance Archive, which features unique works by Cunningham’s famous artist collaborators including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Arguably the most sweeping and far-reaching exhibition of Ms. Alexander’s career at the Walker will be International Pop, which opens in Minneapolis in 2015 before travelling to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Raised in Massachusetts, Ms. Alexander earned her M.A. in Art History at Williams College and B.A. from Bates College. She began her career as a photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, serving as the photography liaison for Modern Starts: MoMA2000, a museum-wide millennial project. Ms. Alexander received MoMA’s Lee Tanenbaum Award for Curatorial Excellence. She introduced art stars Rachel Harrison, Olafur Eliasson, and Sam Taylor-Johnson to New York audiences in a group exhibition in 1998. She is married to curator David E. Little and the couple has two children.

Following her tenure at MoMA and prior to joining the Walker in 2009, Ms. Alexander was Senior Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art where she organized the critically acclaimed exhibition SlideShow and originated the museum’s still-pulsating Front Room series, devoted to short-term artist residencies. She also introduced SiteMaryland, an initiative centered on campus-wide installations animating the building and grounds of the Baltimore Museum of Art.