Art Movements: Michelle Millar Fisher Heads to Cooper Hewitt

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The New York museum hires a new chief curator, Getty grants $1.8M for Black visual art archives, and an artist’s cheeky plea on the High Line.

Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.

Smithsonian Design Museum Gets New Chief Curator

Michelle Millar Fisher, until recently the curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been named chief curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. Beyond these hallowed halls, Fisher is known for her contributions to long-taboo conversations around wages and compensation in the art world. You might remember her 2019 Art + Museum Transparency initiative, which she co-founded while at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to expose the industry’s drastically underpaid positions, or her committed work on design and motherhood.

“Design includes systems and environments, and to function well such ecosystems require trust, care, and transparency,” Fisher told Hyperallergic. “I’ve always tried to center this ethos in the way I contribute to teams that I work within, no matter my role. The same will be true at Cooper Hewitt — and I get the sense that approach is not only warmly welcomed but already practiced.”

Fisher will succeed Matilda McQuaid, who will be retiring this spring after 24 years at the museum.

Getty Awards $1.8M for Black Visual Arts Archives

The Getty awarded $1.8 million in grants to eight institutions through its Black Visual Arts Archive initiative, which provides funding to process historical records related to Black art to increase public visibility and access. The institutions include the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, and the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland. Since its launch in 2022, the initiative has awarded more than $4.5 million in grants to more than 20 museums, libraries, and universities nationwide — bringing the public closer to works like the above photograph of Harlem Renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones with a sweet little studio assistant on her shoulder.

What Else Happened?

• The Harvard Graduate School of Design announced the appointment of Jamie Blosser as the next curator of the Loeb Fellowship.
• Graham C. Boettcher was appointed director and CEO of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts. He will step down from his current role as CEO of the Birmingham Museum of Art in July.
• Artists Coco Fusco and Jeffrey Gibson were named speakers for the second annual Sam Gilliam Lecture Series at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC.
• Claudia Hart received the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art from the Association for Computing Machinery.
• Jennifer Rappaport is the new director of Collections & Registration at the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum in Shoreview, Minnesota.
• Susan Fisher Sterling, the veteran director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, will retire in December after nearly four decades at the institution.
• Gōzō Yoshimasu is the recipient of the inaugural Serpentine × FLAG Art Foundation Prize. 

Wildcard

Near Manhattan’s High Line on 18th Street, artist Nora Turato has unveiled an unmissable blue billboard that simply reads “GIVE US MOM!!!” in yellow, Comic Sans-esque font. It’s not a visual tour de force, but its artistic spareness and candid desperation are what make this punchy cry for help so effective and frankly hilarious. As someone who calls her mother for just about everything, from hard-boiled egg cooking times to monthly existential crises, Turato’s work resonates. As it will for many anxious New Yorkers pacing down 10th Avenue, deep in intrusive-thought spirals about rising rents and AI takeovers, who might look up at the sky and momentarily find their most profound plea materialized.