This story was originally produced by the Valley News. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
A New York City museum curator will be the next executive director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth.
Kim Conaty, who currently serves as the Nancy and Steven Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, will begin her new role at the Hood Oct. 27, according to a Hood Museum news release.
Conaty, who specializes in modern and contemporary art, will replace John Stomberg, who retired in June after leading the museum for a decade. Barbara Will, vice provost for academic and international affairs, has been serving as the Hood’s interim director and will continue in that role until Conaty begins her tenure this fall.
“Kim Conaty is an exceptional leader and visionary curator who understands that beauty and the arts are central to the life of a university and to our mission of forming whole persons and fostering human connections,” Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell said in the release. “She brings the knowledge and experience needed to lead the Hood Museum in developing its next strategic plan and continuing to shape its identity as a center for original scholarship and rich student and community engagement.”
Dartmouth formed a committee late last year made up of 12 college faculty, staff and board members to find Stomberg’s replacement, according to the release. Conaty stood out “in a very competitive search,” search committee chair Colleen Boggs, the college’s associate dean for the arts and humanities, said in the release. Among other attributes, Bogg lauded Conaty’s credentials.
“She brings extensive experience to this leadership role and will provide expert stewardship and forward-thinking vision to a valued campus resource,” Boggs said in the release. “She will be a thought-partner for students, alumni, staff, faculty, and senior leadership, and an incredible advocate for advancing the arts writ large at Dartmouth.”
Conaty, a Middlebury College graduate, started out as a pre-med major before taking an art history class for a general education distribution course. During the class, she wrote a paper about Swedish-American sculptor Claes Oldenburg.
“I recognized that art could be materially and compositionally thrilling but also that it could serve as a portal to another moment in time — the politics, social context, personal histories, the very conditions of a work’s making and how we experience that today,” Conaty said in the release.
She went on to earn a master’s degree in art history from Williams College in Massachusetts and a doctorate in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Conaty’s first museum job, in 2008, was as a curatorial intern and the 2008 Whitney Biennial coordinator, according to the release. She also worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., before returning to the Whitney in 2017, where she served as the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints until 2024, when she became chief curator.
“I am a firm believer that academic museums have the power to create transformative experiences, whether a student is going on to study art history, or simply to have art and culture as part of their lives,” Conaty, whose area of study has been focused on drawings and prints, said in the release.
Conaty will be relocating to the Upper Valley with her husband and their 10- and 13-year-old sons.
“We’re a city family that has always loved every minute we have outside of it — mountains, lakes, you name it,” she said in the release. “This will be a great fit for us.”
The museum is located at 6 E. Wheelock St. in downtown Hanover. Admission is free and its regular hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Its current exhibitions include “Shared Ground: Asian American Art in Conversation,” “Division of Labor: Work in the United States” and “American Pop.”
