Dennis Szakacs. Courtesy Orange County Museum of Art.
Dennis Szakacs will resign from his position as director and CEO of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Newport Beach, Calif., in December. His resignation comes after a decade of service. Szakacs will stay on as a consultant to the museum until the middle of 2014. His successor has not yet been named.
Szakacs doubled OCMA’s annual budget and increased the museum’s endowment by $4 million. Exhibitions under Szakacs’s tenure include the first retrospectives of Mary Heilmann, Peter Saul and Richard Jackson.
OCMA president and board chair Craig Wells said in a press release, “The OCMA board, staff and art community recognize and appreciate the contribution Dennis has made to elevating the stature and significance of OCMA. . . . His artistic integrity, entrepreneurial thinking and public engagement have helped propel us to where we are today and set our direction for the next decade and beyond.”
In the same press release, Szakacs discussed his time at OCMA: “I’ve had a fantastic decade at the museum building OCMA’s exhibition program to international prominence, strengthening the collection, increasing access to visual arts education and raising the support and visibility for modern and contemporary art in our community.”
