ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF TIMKEN GETS JOB IN N.Y.

Grant Holcomb, associate director of the Timken Art Gallery in Balboa Park, will become director of the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y. Holcomb assumes his new post, which includes an adjunct professorship at the University of Rochester, on July 1. The Timken Gallery has no immediate plans to appoint a successor.

Holcomb, 40, succeeds Brett Waller, who has been appointed associate director for public affairs at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Holcomb came to San Diego in 1981, as curator at the San Diego Museum of Art. Previously he taught art history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Since joining the Timken in the fall of 1983, he has initiated programs to increase its local profile and highlight the gallery’s important collection of European and American paintings and Russian icons. Holcomb’s “Focus” exhibitions illuminated single works of art in a broader cultural context. He also organized a symposium of scholars to highlight the gallery’s acquisition last year of a John Singleton Copley masterwork, “The Portrait of Mrs. Thomas Gage” (1771).

Holcomb said the Rochester position “will enable me to direct one of the most highly regarded museums in the country. Its collection runs from Egyptian art to the present, with strengths in medieval, and 19th-Century French and American art. I think we can build the collection dramatically, in terms of American and European painting and sculpture of the last 30 years.”

Holcomb also said that he was actively at work on the Timken’s fall and spring programs and plans to maintain a close association with the gallery. He speculated that the Timken may not hire another associate director, relying instead on an advisory board of art scholars.