COURTESY MIA
Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum has a new director and chief curator, David E. Little, who is currently the curator and head of the department of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The museum, which is based in Amherst, Massachusetts, announced that Little will start in his new position on August 31.
Before joining the MIA (an awkward acronym but a superb encyclopedic museum), Little served as associate director and chair of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was director of adult and academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, according to the museum’s release.
“This is a particularly exciting moment for college and university museums to embolden the campus and curriculum with art, engage artists to innovate across disciplines and provide broad cultural platforms by which ideas can be discussed and debated,” Little said in a statement. “I very much look forward to participating in Amherst’s dynamic and diverse community.”
Minneapolis’s Star Tribune reports that Little’s journey to New England will place him bring much closer to his wife, Darsie Alexander, who was named director of the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York last year; she was previously a curator at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center.
The Mead is part of the Five Colleges’ online collection database, which offers images of its entire 18,000-piece holdings—lots of fun to poke around in it if you have the time; I just came across this intriguing-looking Milton Avery in the Mead’s collection.