MoMA design curator named

Barry Bergdoll, chair of the department of art history at Columbia University, has been named chief curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Bergdoll will assume the position Jan. 1, succeeding Terence Riley, who served from 1992 until leaving the post last March to become director of the Miami Art Museum.

In an interview Wednesday, Bergdoll said that moving from academia to the museum world “is a less dramatic shift than it might appear” because his career has involved organizing several landmark exhibitions on 19th and 20th century architecture, including MoMA’s 2001 exhibition on the work of Mies van der Rohe, “Mies in Berlin.”

“Exhibitions are a middle ground between critical and historical research and investigation through space and design,” Bergdoll said. “It is not a leap into the unknown. And unlike academic work, there is much greater teamwork in creating an exhibition, so it is in a sense like architecture, with so many people involved in building it.”

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-- Diane Haithman