Art Museums Acting Director Named

Long-time Harvard museum employee Marjorie B. Cohn will take a second tour as acting director of the University Art Museums, the provost’s office announced last week.

Cohn, who served as acting director for 11 months in 1990 and 1991, will assume the post in January when departing director James Cuno leaves for the Courtald Institute of Art in England.

Cohn is the Weyerhaeuser curator of prints at the Fogg Art Museum.

Cohn said she is glad to be able to pitch in to keep the art museums on course, but said she hopes her tenure as acting director will be a short one.

“I would hope that a new director be found very quickly...hopefully any day now,” Cohn joked.

Until a permanent director is found, Cohn said she will tend to matters including the upcoming—but as yet unplanned—renovation of the facilities which house Harvard’s collections.

Already complicated physical planning became even more complex this summer when the University scrapped plans for a new museum of modern art in the Riverside neighborhood of Cambridge, bowing to residents’ protest against the project.

Cohn said she will also oversee more day-to-day concerns such as the planning of exhibits and the acquisition of new works.

Plans for moving some of Harvard’s museums to University land in Allston are far enough over the horizon, Cohn said, that she didn’t think she’d be intimately involved in that planning process.

She said she hasn’t been asked to take Cuno’s place on a committee advising the central administration on the place of cultural institutions in Allston.

Cohn said that Provost Steven E. Hyman, who is handling art-related matters for the University, did not have a complicated agenda for her, but told her “he likes what [the museums] are doing” and urged her “to hold down the fort.”

“He obviously thought it was important to have someone from the curatorial side run things while they search for a new director,” Cohn said of Hyman.

An employee of Harvard’s art museums for 41 years, Cohn certainly fits the bill. Beginning as a volunteer just out of Harvard graduate school, Cohn worked her way up Harvard’s job scale, hitting nearly every rung on the ladder in the last four decades.

In 1989, after having worked exclusively as a conservator, Cohn made the switch to the curatorial department, where she has worked since.

Like anyone who worked at Harvard’s art museums during the 1990s, Cohn said, she appreciated the special commitment then-President Neil L. Rudenstine and his wife Angelica had to the museums.

Cohn dismissed claims that art museum personnel feared that their stature within the University would be diminished under Rudenstine’s successor, President Lawrence H. Summers.

“Its no reflection of President Summers that no one could have the type of commitment to the arts that Rudenstine did, more so than any other Harvard president,” Cohn said.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.