NEW YORK, NY.- Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, will retire in June 2024 after 15 years in the role, the center announced Thursday.

“I’ve had a nearly 40-year career in art museums,” said Strick, 68, who has led the nonprofit organization since 2009. “And I’ve always kept an informal list of ideas and projects I wanted to pursue independently. And I thought that now would be a good moment when I still have the time — and, really, the energy — to pursue them.

“I love working with artists, and I want to build on some of the relationships and ideas I’ve developed over the years.”

Over his years at the institution, Strick has diversified its collection, focusing on acquiring work by female artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta; artists of color including Xxavier Edward Carter and Simone Leigh; and LGBTQ creators like Catalina Ouyang and James Magee.

But what he is most proud of, he said, is establishing the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, a $100,000 cash award presented to a living artist that has become one of the art world’s top honors. Since 2016, eight artists have received the prize, five of them women.

“What I like about the prize is that it’s not a competition, it’s not a visible competition between the artists,” Nairy Baghramian, who received the 2022 prize, told The New York Times in an interview. “It’s discreet and it’s beautiful how the jury members do their homework behind the scenes.”

Through ambitious exhibitions, programming and acquisitions, Strick, who came to the Nasher from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, transformed the center into a destination, while also keeping it firmly rooted in the work of the Dallas and North Texas communities.

Some of his biggest accomplishments, he said, are the center’s latest exhibition, “Groundswell: Women of Land Art,” which Times critic Deborah Solomon called a “fresh and fascinating attempt to update the land-art canon”; the support the center provided to North Texas artists during the pandemic through its Nasher Public program, when it exhibited the work of 11 artists in its glass-enclosed vestibule; and a 10th-anniversary exhibition the center presented from 2013-14 called Nasher Xchange, which commissioned 10 contemporary artists to create site-specific art for public spaces in Dallas.

David Haemisegger, chair of the Nasher Center’s board of trustees, will lead an international search for Strick’s successor.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.