Halbreich's Legacy and Her Next Act

I love the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which Kathy Halbreich will leave as director in November. I admire it for its nerve and prescience in taking flyers on lesser-known artists and audacious exhibition concepts. It's a tradition that Halbreich has ably carried on from her legendary predecessor, Martin Friedman.

As her contemporary, I also love that Halbreich explained her departure to Carol Vogel of the NY Times by saying: "I've got at least one more professional chapter. This seems like the right time to go."

So where might she be going? What follows is wild, completely uninformed and unfounded speculation, but what else are blogs for?

I couldn't help but notice what seemed to me a special vibe (no, not THAT kind of vibe) between Halbreich and Glenn Lowry at last month's ADAA-sponsored panel discussion on museum collecting. They seemed chummy. She spoke fondly during the panel discussion about the recent lunch she had had with him. And, most memorably to me, it was she who defended him against CultureGrrl's rude query about Lowry's compensation during the question-and-answer period: She shut down that discussion by declaring Lowry to be "probably their [MoMA's] best acquisition."

Could it be that she's in talks to move to MoMA, which has been trying very hard (but with mixed success) to up its contemporary ante?

I've been speculating about Lowry's next act, even before the emergence of the compensation controversy that now dogs him. The fact is that, with few exceptions, directors who have been through a grueling expansion project seem to leave their institutions soon afterwards.

In that regard, Walker board president Steve Shank told Mary Abbe of the Minneapolis Star Tribune that "he was not surprised by her impending departure because 'after these big building campaigns it is not unusual to have these transitions.'"

Now that the Education Wing is finally done, does Glenn really want to go through yet another expansion project?

But wait a minute! Maybe Halbreich should go to MASS MoCA in the idyllic Berkshires, and Joe Thompson, a resourceful and art-savvy administrator with a Wharton M.B.A., should move from there to MoMA.

And in other contemporary art news: Mark Rosenthal, formerly of the Philadelphia Museum, National Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum, Guggenheim Museum and Menil Collection, has now landed at the Detroit Institute of Arts as adjunct curator for contemporary art.

I haven't even had my first cup of coffee this morning. Maybe I'd better have some breakfast and calm down!

UPDATE: Judging from today's Q&A between Modern Art Notes and Halbreich, she's not thinking of MoMA, but something "smaller."