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Please join Frye Art Museum Executive Director Jamilee Lacy for a special conversation with Seattle Art Museum Interim Executive Director and CEO Kimerly Rorschach.

Their conversation will look back on Kim’s impactful multi-decade career as a museum director and her highly regarded tenure at Seattle Art Museum. The two directors will additionally discuss the meaningful arts and culture work being done in our region and what the future holds for art museums across the country.

Please note: this is an in-person event with a virtual, livestreamed option.

Register: Virtual Livestream

About the Panelists

Jamilee Lacy was appointed Executive Director of the Frye Art Museum in January 2023. Prior to joining the Frye, she served as Inaugural Director and Chief Curator of Providence College Galleries since 2014, establishing PCG as an innovative contemporary arts institution with an acclaimed exhibitions program and permanent collection. A prolific curator, Lacy has organized dozens of contemporary art exhibitions and projects, most recently with artists Sanford Biggers and Edie Fake, and was a 2020 recipient of a curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She holds a BFA in Art and Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in Comparative Art & Literature from Northwestern University, and was a Class of 2022 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Kimerly Rorschach currently serves as the Interim Director of the Seattle Art Museum. She was also previously the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO of the Seattle Art Museum from 2012 until 2019. Previously, she was director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (2004-2012) and the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago (1994-2004).

At the Seattle Art Museum, Rorschach built and diversified the collection and exhibition program, presenting groundbreaking exhibitions including Disguise: Masks and Global African Art (2015), Chiho Aoshima: Rebirth of the World (2015), and Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, and Mickalene Thomas (2018), among many others. She also established an increased focus on local and regional artists within the context of global collections and programs, and built wide-ranging partnerships in Seattle’s fast-growing and increasingly diverse communities. Under her leadership, the museum also centered and elevated its work around equity and inclusion, a top priority in the museum’s strategic planning and board and staff recruitment. She led a $150M campaign to strengthen the museum’s endowment, and to fund a major renovation and expansion of the historic Seattle Asian Art Museum, one of SAM’s three sites.

Rorschach holds a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and a PhD in art history from Yale. She is a past president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. Rorschach also serves on the advisory board of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and she is the current Board President of the American Federation of Arts in New York. She also serves on the Center for Curatorial Leadership Board of Trustees.