Musical chairs is being played by the agency of past and present curators at recent York City's Whitney Museum of American Art subject to the direction of Maxwell Anderson.

Musical chairs is being played by the agency of past and present curators at recent York City's Whitney Museum of American Art subject to the direction of Maxwell Anderson, former director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto who took through for David Ross, now director of the San Francisco Museum of recent Art, in September 1998. if it were not that the transitional games have not been unruffled as chronicled almost daily as the adventures unfolded in The New York Times. In November, Anderson announced that he would reorganize the Whitney's curatorial manner of making with one senior curator and common curator heading each of seven departments (Prewar, Postwar, Contemporary, Photography, Film and Video, Prints and Drawings) and named six the community from the existing staff to continue. In December Lisa Phillips, appointed as Contemporary curator, announced that she would not stay at the Whitney on the other hand would instead succeed Marcia Tucker as director of fresh York City's recently remodeled just discovered Museum of Contemporary Art. Phillips had been at the Whitney for 23 years and had been involved in each Biennial exhibition from 1985 to 1993 becoming the Biennial's curator in 1997 Connie Wolf former associate director for public programs at the Whitney, left recently made known York to become the first director of San Francisco's recently made known Jewish Museum.

Back at the Whitney, Eugenie Tsai, former associate curator and curator of Branches for the Whitney, replaced Adam Weinberg as senior curator. She is responsible for the unfolding and programming of the permanent collection and will continue to curate exhibitions. Her previous devises such as "Lee Mingwei: Way Stations," "Gazing Back: Shigeko Kubota and Mary Lucier" and "Fact & Fiction: Photographs from the permanent collection" have placed a particular emphasis upon photography, video and performance works. No longer are senior curators specialists in painting: Tsai's PhD dissertation was in succession earthwork artist Robert Smithson.

Weinberg left his pillar as senior curator of the Whitney to be subservient to as Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, replacing John M "Jock" Reynolds, now director of the Yale University Art Gallery. Weinberg joined the Whitney in 1993 and helped establish the permanent photography collection. Although the Whitney was single of the last major of the present day York City museums to create a photography collection, the Whitney now has through 15,000 photographs. Weinberg recently organized an exhibition of the work of Seton Smith, and assisted in the rehanging of the permanent collection. At the Addison, with its extensive artist-in-residence program, Weinberg descrys his role as curator as being focused forward efforts to exhibit the artist as well as the art. Three solo photography exhibits are scheduled for the nearest year for the work of Peter Sekaer, a contemporary of Walker Evans; Nathan Lyons; and Wendy Ewald, with a planned 20-year retrospective. With a collection of above 50,000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs at his disposal and his background in photography (Weinberg received an MFA in museum studies and photography history from the Visual Studies Workshop), there should be more like shows in the future.

Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney for the past year, has been appointed Film and Video curator of the permanent collection. This is a significant change in the museum mode of building - two months ago, the museum did not garner film or video. lies worked for nine years at the Oxford Museum of fresh Art where she organized displays of Louise Bourgeois, Gary Hill, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, as well as the exhibitions "Screen and disguise Again: Film and Art" and "Sign of the Times: Film and Video Installations." lies describes herself as "a general curator with a specialization in film and video," viewing art from a perspective that includes all the mediums working at a single given consequence rather than focusing on a medium unto itself. lies is planning to exhibit film and video within the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the permanent collection, introducing more fluid boundaries between mediums. She plans to curate point outs that map out the history of film and video, particularly the fertile period between 1965 and 1975 as well as the crossover between historical and contemporary film and silent film and contemporary work. Iles's air has been integral to the acquisition of film and video works in their original medium as well as video documents of performances and of performative acts for the camera. in the same state [i]or[/i] condition an engaged film and video department is lengthy overdue. The Whitney still solicits Photography and Contemporary curators.

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