After five accomplished years at the helm, Midge Bowman is retiring as executive director of the Frye Art Museum. The Board of Trustees has announced the appointment of her successor, internationally renowned curator and museum director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. As the first Frye Foundation Scholar and curator of exhibitions such as The Munich Secession and America; Transatlantic: American Artists in Germany; and Gaze: Vision, Desire, and Difference in the Frye Collections at the Frye, Jo-Anne is a familiar face at the Museum. Midge, Jo-Anne, and Robin Held sat down recently for a brief conversation about the past, present, and future of leadership at the Frye.

Midge: “I am delighted with Jo-Anne’s appointment. Her breadth of experience, knowledge of the Collection, and assistance in interfacing with German institutions have been instrumental to positioning us as a center for German art. It is also the optimal time for the Frye to return to a curator-director model.”

Jo-Anne: “My personal and professional ties to the Frye go back sixteen years when Richard West first approached me to assist in researching specific works within the Collection. I am very attached to the Frye. Having spent twenty-five years in museums, I decided to work as an independent scholar and curator. However, I quickly discovered that the time I was happiest was when I was at the Frye. I am one of those ‘museum people’ who thrive on being part of a team.”

Robin: “The Frye has enormous potential—we all agree on that. And so much has been accomplished under Midge’s leadership. There is no turning back: from creating the archive to a renewed appreciation for the Collection, to working with the Board to ensure that we have new and better ways to honor and extend the legacy of Charles and Emma Frye. Building on that foundation, I would say the stakes just got raised, or planted very differently, on a national and international playing field.

“Under Midge’s direction, the Frye has been generating rigorous historical and contemporary exhibitions, using experimental exhibition strategies, changing visitors’ habits, and disrupting conventional patterns of viewing. Working with Jo-Anne in 2008 on the concurrent exhibitions Empire, Napoleon on the Nile, and Gaze, we saw how our combined strengths enhanced our potential to expand and elevate these strategies. I look forward to building on that collaboration. It makes a difference that we’re not on our first date.”

Jo-Anne: “Disrupting patterns is an excellent description. I prefer working this way, as a curatorial team in dialogue. One of the key goals for the Frye will be imagining and securing the future. Another will be honoring the past while re-describing the present.

“When we look at museums today, the models on which they are based were developed in the mid-nineteenth century. But we live in a city with one newspaper, and in a place where cultural products and information are disseminated and shared in entirely new and exciting ways. The Frye is exemplary in this new model: the Board of Trustees has committed to this being a twenty-first century, visionary institution. I am excited to be here, and to be part of fundamental conversations about the major cultural shifts we are facing.

“Midge’s leadership, Robin’s curatorial vision, the wonderful support of the Board, and of course the involvement of our members have really started us on that road. The possibilities are limitless.”

Born in Brisbane, Australia, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker lived in the Pacific Northwest from 1977 to 1991, during which time she served as curator and then director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Birnie Danzker left Vancouver for Munich, where she directed the Museum Villa Stuck for fifteen years.

An exceptional curator of modern and contemporary art, Birnie Danzker’s exhibitions have earned critical acclaim at the International Center of Photography in New York (1980), Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and P.S. 1—MOMA (2002), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2005). Her tenure at the Frye begins October 1.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2009 edition of the FRYE members’ magazine.

Left to right: Robin Held, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, and Midge Bowman. Photo: Jill Hardy