DIRECTOR OF MICHIGAN’S KRESGE ART MUSEUM TO STEP DOWN

Susan J. Bandes, director of Michigan State University’s Kresge Art Museum, will step down from that position to pursue research interests and teaching, effective May 1. Bandes will remain a full-time professor within the Department of Art and Art History.

“In Susan Bandes’s nearly a quarter of a century as director of the Kresge Art Museum, she has doubled the size of the collection and the staff,” said Karin Wurst, dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “Among her important contemporary acquisitions have been works by Joseph Cornell, Jim Nutt, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Edward Burtynsky, and John Scott. She has greatly improved our collection of Dutch old masters, as well with paintings by Jan van Goyen, Anthonie De Lorme, Jacob Van Loo, and landscapes across the centuries. Additionally, she reconnected the Friends of Kresge, a large and active support group which recently raised one million dollars toward the construction of the planned Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. She established the first endowment funds for the museum and has added to them to the point where we are able to make very significant acquisitions.”

Bandes began her career at MSU as director and professor in 1986. In addition to directing the museum, she was also responsible for creating academic links across the university to develop interdisciplinary programming, grant writing, fund-raising, serving as liaison with the Friends of Kresge volunteer group, and strategic planning. She served as curator for the museum’s holdings prior to the nineteenth century and of the print collection and as codirector of the Museum Studies Program.