Newport Museum Director to Leave for Chicago Post

Kevin E. Consey, director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, has been named to head the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, it was announced Friday. Consey will assume the new post Nov. 15.

The Newport museum is in the midst of a $50-million capital campaign to establish an endowment and to build a new facility. Consey’s replacement will be the museum’s fourth director in a decade. A search committee has been named and will begin work immediately, according to Thomas H. Nielsen, president of the museum board.

Consey, 38, has led the Newport Harbor for six years and received an annual salary of $85,000.

It is unclear what impact Consey’s departure will have on the Newport Harbor’s plans. Preliminary designs by architect Renzo Piano for a new museum building have been approved, land has been obtained and fund raising is under way.

In any case, Consey will not escape the fund-raising treadmill. In Chicago, he will be heading a similar campaign, also for $50 million, according to Paul Olivier-Hoffman, chairman of the board.

In announcing Consey’s new appointment, Olivier-Hoffman said that he “represents the new generation of museum directors, combining uncompromising artistic vision with strong management skills and capital campaign experience.”

Consey called the appointment “one of the most coveted museum directorships to open in the last decade.”

The Chicago museum is a rather small, offbeat and fairly avant-garde institution that is considered important in art circles but is not generally ranked among the world’s premiere museums. It is one of the country’s oldest museums devoted to contemporary art.

Olivier-Hoffman’s announcement cited a number of exhibitions that Consey has organized at Newport Harbor in collaboration with curator Paul Schimmel. These include “Chris Burden: A Twenty Year Survey,” “Gunter Forg,” “L.A. Pop in the Sixties” and “Robert Morris: Works of the Eighties,” which was organized in conjunction with the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

Consey has a bachelor’s degree from Hofstra University on Long Island and a master’s degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Museum Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

He has taught 20th-Century art history at the University of Texas and the University of Virginia, and has lectured on not-for-profit management to business students at UCLA and UC Irvine.

Consey joined the Newport Harbor museum after stints at the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Emily Lowe Gallery of Hofstra University. He succeeded Cathleen Gallander, who left in 1983 to become an exhibition consultant in New York.