MOCA curator Ann Goldstein to lead Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum*

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Ann Goldstein, a 25-year veteran of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and its senior curator since 2001, has been appointed general artistic director of the Stedelijk Museum, a leading modern and contemporary art institution in Amsterdam.

The first woman and the first American to head the Dutch institution, she will assume her new position in January, succeeding Gijs van Tuyl, who has directed the Stedelijk for the last five years.

‘This is a wonderful opportunity to work with an institution that has an extraordinary collection, a remarkable history of exhibitions and is poised after a period of renovation to reposition itself as one of the world’s great museums,’ Goldstein said, reached by telephone at her office at MOCA.

Currently closed while the old building is remodeled and a new addition is constructed, the Stedelijk is expected to reopen in 2010, she said. The inaugural show will be a retrospective of Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley’s work, which will travel to MOCA.

Goldstein said that the Los Angeles museum’s financial troubles played no part

in her decision to move to Amsterdam.

‘This is an opportunity that I took very seriously outside of that context,’ she said. ‘But as a person who has worked at MOCA for so many years, I do think a lot about museums and their value to society. The chance to move into a leadership role made sense at this point in my career.’

The move will also put Goldstein closer to her husband, artist Christopher Williams, who joined the faculty of the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in Germany last fall as a professor of photography.

A native of Los Angeles who studied painting and sculpture at UCLA, Goldstein has organized and coordinated dozens of exhibitions at MOCA, including solo shows of works by Alexis Smith, Richard Artschwager, Tony Oursler, Andy Warhol and Thomas Struth. She has also played key curatorial roles in large group exhibitions such as ‘A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,’ a 1989 exhibition of American art from the 1970s and ‘80s, and ‘1965-75: Reconsidering the Art Object,’ a 1995 survey of Conceptual art.

Working on her own, she organized ‘A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968,’ a critically acclaimed, landmark project that appeared at the museum in 2004.

-- Suzanne Muchnic

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post said the Stedelijk is expected to reopen in fall 2010; a specific opening date in 2010 hasn’t been determined.