COURTESY NEWARK MUSEUM
The start of the year is bringing all sorts of moves in the museum world, with news today that Met curator Nicholas Cullinan will lead London’s National Gallery and that Raven Row’s Alex Sailsbury will chair Whitechapel’s board of trustees. And now this: Tricia Laughlin Bloom, previously the associate curator of exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, will become curator of American art at New Jersey’s Newark Museum, which announced the hire today.
“The Newark Museum has a unique and distinguished history of collecting and interpreting great American art along with extraordinary global collections,” Bloom said in a statement. “I’m excited to be joining an institution that has so much to offer the communities of Newark and the greater New York and New Jersey area.”
Among Bloom’s curatorial credits are “HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” and “WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” as well as “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks,” for which she served as coordinator, and which opens at the Brooklyn Museum in April.
The Newark Museum has a strong and varied American art collection, which includes Joseph Stella’s absolutely epic five-panel painting Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (1920–22), which you can view as a very large jpeg right here.