County Museum Loses Another Curator : Art: Judi Freeman becomes the sixth one to resign from the embattled museum in the past few months.

Judi Freeman, associate curator of 20th-Century art at the County Museum of Art, has resigned to become Joan Whitney Payson curator at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Me. Her resignation will be effective on June 18, after the opening of an exhibition of Mark Tansey’s work, which she organized for LACMA.

“I had been looking at a lot of different opportunities in which I could really mold a small museum, and this is a place of enormous potential,” Freeman said of her new position. “I believe passionately in women in this profession, that it’s important for women to play administrative roles as well as senior curatorial roles. For me, this is a great opportunity to shape the entire exhibition program and take on administrative responsibilities with incredible support from a great group of trustees. They--and many other people in Portland--really want to make things happen there.”

“Judi is a productive and valued member of the museum’s family and I appreciate her desire to make a change in her career direction,” museum director Michael Shapiro said. “We look forward to working with her as a guest curator for a Picasso exhibition, which will open here in February, and we wish her well.”

Freeman’s move comes at a time of fiscal crisis and staff upheaval at the Wilshire Boulevard museum. She is the sixth curator to announce their resignations in the past few months, including Philip Conisbee, curator of European painting and sculpture, who has been appointed curator of French painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Freeman, who was educated at Vassar College, Johns Hopkins University and Yale University, came to LACMA in 1985. The exhibitions she has organized for LACMA include “The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image” and “The Fauve Landscape,” which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In addition to the pending Picasso show, “Picasso and the Weeping Women: The Years of Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar” (which will travel to the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago), Freeman has been working with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on a major collaborative exhibition, “Art in Film.” “I will continue to be involved with that project, but I’m not sure what my role will be,” Freeman said.

The Portland Museum of Art, founded in 1882, is housed in a building designed by I.M. Pei. The collection includes Impressionist, modern and contemporary works, as well as an important collection of American artist Winslow Homer’s paintings. Freeman’s curatorial chair is named for the late arts patron Joan Whitney Payson, whose heirs sold Van Gogh’s “Irises” from her collection to finance a charitable foundation. (The painting is now owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum.)