NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- If there is a museum director who embodies Mayor Bill de Blasio’s commitment to empowerment and inclusion, it is Gonzalo Casals, who leads the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in SoHo, which is devoted to queer art. Now the mayor has given Casals a new title: New York City’s Cultural Affairs Commissioner, for the largest local funder of arts and culture in the United States.

“Art and culture should enrich the lives of all New Yorkers — not just a select few,” de Blasio said in a statement. “Gonzalo understands how to uplift the experiences of New Yorkers from all five boroughs.”

Casals is an immigrant from Argentina who identifies as queer. Since 2017, he has led the Leslie-Lohman, a museum with roots in the LGBTQ civil rights movement, diversifying its collection and programming with contributions from the gay community. Casals previously served as deputy and interim director at El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, a major center for Latino art and culture, where he stepped in after Margarita Aguilar left amid turmoil.

“I look forward to continuing to further the work that the agency has been doing,” Casals, who starts April 13, said in a telephone interview. “Opening up opportunities in the sector for folks like me — immigrant communities, queer communities, Latinx communities.”

Casals also served as vice president for education and community engagement at Friends of the High Line, which focused on the elevated railway’s effect on surrounding neighborhoods. “He taught me and the board that we need to think about community engagement in every part of the organization, not just through programming,” said Robert Hammond, a co-founder and executive director of the High Line. “He is exactly what New York needs right now.”

Casals replaces Tom Finkelpearl, who stepped down in October after five years as commissioner, amid a controversy over replacing the city’s monuments with more women and people of color.

The mayor and Finkelpearl maintained that their decision to part ways was mutual. But de Blasio found himself having to defend against critics who condemned the city’s decision not to make the nun Mother Cabrini one of its first new statues (they included actor Chazz Palminteri, who called the mayor’s wife, Chirlane McCray, a “racist”).

During Finkelpearl’s tenure, the city’s cultural budget increased more than 35%, to $211.6 million for fiscal year 2020, from $156.1 million for 2014. And the city’s first comprehensive cultural plan, unveiled in 2017, tied its funding to the diversity of arts institutions’ employees and board members.

While Finkelpearl was a mild-mannered leader who eschewed the back-channeling, brass-knuckled negotiating of municipal politics, Casals is widely described as an activist, comfortable stepping into the fray.

“He is not afraid to challenge institutions and traditional power structures,” said Jimmy Van Bramer of Queens, chairman of the City Council committee that oversees cultural affairs. “He’s a thinker but he’s also a fighter.”

Adam D. Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, called Casals a “seasoned and passionate arts advocate” with “strong values.”

At the Leslie-Lohman Museum, Casals has overseen shows such as “On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work” last fall, which focused on the lives of sex workers in the LGBTQ community and featured pieces by artists who themselves worked as prostitutes.

“The museum has a history it can be proud of, a radical one,” The New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote in his review of another exhibition, “Found: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction.” “From the start, it championed an outcast art and stood boldly, unfashionably, by it,” Cotter wrote. “Now it is complicating its earlier aesthetic direction without compromising its social mission, which is a tough act to pull off.”

The museum dates to 1969, when Charles W. Leslie and his partner Fritz Lohman began showing work by gay artists in their loft. “It’s very important for mainstream museums — not just for cultural specific museums like mine — to show that work,” Casals said in 2017, speaking of exhibitions dealing with gender fluidity. “The best way you can alienate a community is by denying them their reflection in society.”

Casals, who came to New York City from Buenos Aires in 2002, has served on a number of city commissions and task forces, including the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, which developed guidelines for rethinking monuments “seen as oppressive and inconsistent with the values of New York City.” He also played an official advisory role during the public engagement process for the cultural plan, CreateNYC.

An active community resident of Jackson Heights, Queens, Casals teaches at the City University of New York, Yale University and New York University.

“I’m taking this appointment extremely seriously,” Casals said. “Making sure I send the message that these communities and other marginal communities understand their stories matter.”

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