COURTESY FIU
The former head of Arizona’s Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Timothy Rodgers, has been named director of the Wolfsonian-Florida International University collection in Miami Beach. Having recently resigned from his six-year-directorship at SMoCA, Rodgers will begin his new position on July 1.
The Wolfsonian-FIU serves as a kind of museum/library/research center hybrid, and holds a collection of approximately 120,000 objects dating from 1885 to 1945, including furniture, visual art, rare books, and propaganda posters. Rodgers is primarily interested in growing both the museum’s physical building as well as its digital archive, impelled by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation $5 million, 5-year grant donated back in 2012 for the purpose of supporting public access to the collection, especially via the internet.
Rodgers’ connection with the Wolfsonian-FIU reaches back to 1989, the year that the institution’s Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts published his first scholarly article. In a statement, Rodgers said, “We will have more programs connecting the museum’s collection with a community of supporters, students, scholars, and researchers around the world. The Wolfsonian will be at the forefront of all conversations about the future of museums, visual studies, modernist scholarship, and audience engagement.”
He added, “I want to ensure that more people recognize the fact that The Wolfsonian–FIU is a world-class museum, one that intelligently and creatively engages with a vast array of cultural artifacts to help all of us understand our history, our present and our future.”