DERRICK CARTWRIGHT NAMED DIRECTOR OF SEATTLE ART MUSEUM

The Seattle Art Museum’s board of trustees announced today that Derrick R. Cartwright has been chosen as the Seattle Art Museum’s new Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director following an international search. Cartwright succeeds Mimi Gates, who is retiring on June 30, 2009 after fifteen years as the museum’s director. Cartwright has been the executive director at the San Diego Museum of Art since 2004 and will begin his position at the Seattle Art Museum in the fall of 2009.

“We had an incredible pool of candidates but Derrick was clearly the right leader to leverage and build upon the remarkable foundation SAM has built under Mimi Gates’s leadership,” said Charlie Wright, chair of the search committee and museum trustee.

Over the past five years, under Cartwright’s leadership, the San Diego Museum has increased its traveling exhibition and permanent collection loan programs, and added more than one thousand new acquisitions to the collection.

Prior to his position at the San Diego Museum of Art, Cartwright was the director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College from 2001 to 2004 where he was instrumental in organizing several noteworthy exhibitions, including the critically acclaimed “Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past,” which traveled to the J. Paul Getty Museum. From 1998 to 2000, Cartwright directed the Musée d’Art Américain Giverny in France.