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Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh introduced final week that the Andy Warhol Museum’s director, Patrick Moore, would depart his put up on 31 Might. Moore has labored on the museum for 13 years, seven of them as director.
Beneath his management, the museum expanded its exhibition programmes worldwide (together with to Saudi Arabia) and launched the controversial Pop District—a ten-year, $80m venture that may remodel a number of blocks surrounding the museum with public artwork, a efficiency venue and a “creative-economy workforce improvement” programme.
“My 13 years on the Warhol have been essentially the most formative of my life,” Moore stated in a press release. “After having had a sabbatical in 2023 the place my husband and I have been capable of spend three months at our residence in Spain, I’ve determined our future is there, in his residence nation.”
As information of Moore’s sudden departure unfold, so did rumours that this was a results of controversies surrounding the Andy Warhol Museum. Information shops pointed to a December report by Pittsburgh public-radio station WESA’s Invoice O’Driscoll, who discovered that a variety of museum staff have been sad with the Pop District venture—5 director-level workers had already left—and with Moore’s management on the whole, which some noticed as too targeted on fundraising and never sufficient on curation. Different media pointed to Moore’s controversial determination to curate a Warhol present in Saudi Arabia, an authoritarian nation that punishes same-sex relationships with loss of life. (Moore later defended the transfer in an opinion piece for Artnet.)
Most lately, Moore was on the centre of a dispute over wall textual content accompanying Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980). Described as “soft-Zionist” in an nameless put up on the Instagram account Change the Museum, the textual content—written by Moore and the museum’s former chief curator Aaron Levi Garvey—implies that the 7 October Hamas assault on Israel was the start of battle within the area. The wall textual content states that museum guests will “mourn the lack of Jewish lives at first of the Center East battle and the humanitarian disaster affecting civilians on each side of the warfare”.
In response to the information experiences, Steven Knapp (the president and chief government of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, which operates the Warhol Museum and several other different establishments within the metropolis) revealed a letter in Artnews, insisting that the rumours weren’t true and that Moore was leaving as a result of he had accepted one other place in Spain.
“Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, of which the Warhol is an integral half, stands behind Patrick’s imaginative and prescient for the Pop District in addition to his seven-year management of the Warhol general,” Knapp wrote. “We see the Pop District as defining a extremely authentic but additionally replicable pathway for arts and cultural establishments in search of to function transformational catalysts of their communities.”
The Andy Warhol Museum’s deputy director, Rachel Baron-Horn, will function interim director whereas the museum searches for Moore’s substitute.
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