S.D. Museum Adds Curators

At a time when museums nationwide are shrinking their staffs and operations because of the economic recession, the San Diego Museum of Art announced Tuesday the appointment of two new curators and the promotion of a third. All three curators will be working within the museum’s department of European art, which boasts a strong collection of Spanish paintings as well as Italian, French and Northern European works.

Malcolm Warner, formerly the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, has been named curator of European art, replacing Nora Desloge, who left the museum in April. Warner will continue to be responsible for the museum’s prints and drawings collection in his new position. He will be joined by Holly Witchey, who has been named associate curator, and Nicole Holland, who will serve as a part-time assistant curator.

Though the changes boost the stature of the department of European art within the museum, the museum’s director, Steven Brezzo, called the moves a consolidation rather than an expansion, since the department of European art will absorb the department of prints and drawings and because Warner and Witchey were already museum employees.

“We’re not going to be extravagant with our appointments, but we are going to meet the needs of the collection,” he said. “We’re OK financially right now, but it’s also good to appoint from the inside.”

Warner, who received his doctorate from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, joined the museum in 1990. He previously worked as a visiting research curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. In his new position, he plans to focus primarily on the museum’s permanent collection by re-installing it according to chronology rather than nationality and by adding substantive new wall labels, possibly in both English and Spanish.

“Big, expensive exhibitions are getting harder to do,” he said. “We should devote more of our energy and funds to the permanent collection.”

The museum added hundreds of new prints and drawings to its collection under Warner’s tenure so far, but Warner, 39, remains guarded as far as his hopes to expand the museum’s other holdings.

“The economy being as it is, the prospect of getting paintings that would live up to what we already have in the department is unlikely. The museum has always depended on support from the community. If we’re going to expand the collection, it’s up to them, really.”

Witchey and Holland both specialized in Italian Renaissance art in their academic training, but will be responsible for researching a broad spectrum of European art up to 1900 in their new positions. Witchey, 31, has been with the museum’s education department since 1990, when she received her Ph.D from Case Western Reserve University in a program linked with the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Holland, 42, recently moved to San Diego from Ft. Worth, Tex., where she served as vice president of Inter-Cultura, a nonprofit institution that organized and circulates museum exhibitions worldwide. Previously, she worked as an associate curator at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth. She received a master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute.

“They’re both research-minded people,” Warner said of Witchey and Holland. “With three people, there will be more time between us to work on the collection than ever before, and that’s a priority of mine.”