Big changes at the Met today!
The museum announced that, after 48 years of service, Morrison H. Heckscher will step down as chairman of its American Wing to become its curator emeritus. Sylvia L. Yount, who is chief curator, curator of American art and department head at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, has been hired as curator in charge of the American Wing.
Mr. Heckscher joined the museum in 1966 as a fellow in the prints department, and went on to serve as assistant curator, associate curator and curator of the American Wing. He has been the wing’s chairman since 2001, and was responsible for overseeing its immaculate renovation and reinstallation, which was completed in 2012.
“Morrie Heckscher has had a long and distinguished career at the Met with many landmark scholarly accomplishments,” the Met’s director, Thomas Campbell, said in a statement. “Perhaps the most significant has been his supervision of the decade-long renovation and reinstallation of the entire American Wing.”
Ms. Yount had been at the VMFA for seven years, after tenures at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
