Provost Teresa Sullivan has announced the interim management team to lead the U-M Museum of Art (UMMA) beginning June 1 and until a new director is in place, pending approval by the Board of Regents.
Kathryn Huss, the museum’s chief administrative officer; Raymond Silverman, director of the Museum Studies Program and professor of history of art and of African and Afroamerican studies; and Ruth Slavin, UMMA’s director of education, will serve as co-directors in the wake of UMMA Director James Steward’s departure for the directorship at the Princeton University Art Museum at the end of May.
“I am grateful to Kathy, Ray, and Ruth for agreeing to take on this vitally important responsibility,” says Sullivan. “I am confident the Museum of Art will be in very capable hands during this interim period.”
Huss, who has been a member of the museum staff since 1997, oversees business and financial operations — including human resources, facilities, and the Museum Store — and served as overall project manager of the museum’s recent expansion and restoration.
Silverman, a scholar of African art and visual culture and leader in the international museum community, came to U-M in 2002 and has been a key collaborator with UMMA — most recently consulting on the planning and interpretation of the museum’s expanded collections galleries — and a longtime member of the museum’s executive committee.
Slavin has led UMMA’s growing educational initiatives since 1998, including expanded public programming and outreach, and managed the museum’s wide-ranging, cross-departmental interpretive project, which resulted in fresh interpretive approaches to the museum’s rich collections on the occasion of its reopening.
UMMA opened its $41.9 million expanded and restored facility on March 28 to wide acclaim and enthusiastic crowds that have welcomed its new style of university art museum — a dynamic multidisciplinary meeting place for the arts that bridges campus and community.
Nearly 24,000 visitors attended the museum’s reopening events, and an average of 7,000 visitors per week have experienced the museum since then.
