This was in several hours ago, but I was away from my email — but I see no news item on it, so let me just post without comment:
Frederic C. Hamilton, Chairman of the Board of the Denver Art Museum, announced today the appointment of Christoph Heinrich as the new Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum (DAM) beginning January 1, 2010. Heinrich has been deputy director of the DAM since January 2009 and the Polly and Mark Addison Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art since October 2007. Heinrich will replace Lewis I. Sharp following Sharp’s December 31, 2009, retirement after 20 years as director.
UPDATED: Don’t expect many changes in the near future. The Denver Post quotes Henrich as saying: “There is in place, a very good, very stable and solid structure, and we we might tweak and we might open some new doors, but it won’t be a revolution.” Here’s the link.
And here’s more from the DAM press release:
With more than 15 years of experience in museums, Heinrich has organized more than 50 exhibitions including nearly 20 consisting of major loans from around the world. Heinrich came to Denver from Hamburg Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, where he spent the last seven of his 13-year tenure as Chief Curator for Contemporary Art, Collections and Exhibitions. He attended the Universitat Wien in Vienna, where he studied Art History and Dramatics. He later attended Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitat München, where he earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. Heinrich is a member of the Warhol Authentication Board and came to Denver to fill the role of curator of modern and contemporary art after an international search.
Since then, he has organized a reinstallation of the 17,000-square-foot modern and contemporary galleries and the first American museum exhibition for German painter Daniel Richter. In November, the Museum will debut Heinrich’s latest project, Embrace!, one of the most ambitious exhibition projects in the Museum’s history featuring 17 site-specific works by contemporary artists from around the world.
The entire release is here.