SEATTLE.- Robin Held, Frye Art Museum chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections, has been named one of ten outstanding curators from art museums across the United States selected as a 2009 fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL).

CCL, founded on the belief that curatorial knowledge and expertise are fundamental to art museums and ought to be at the heart of museum leadership, exists to recognize curatorial excellence and train selected curators for future leadership positions. Co-founded by Agnes Gund, president emerita of The Museum of Modern Art, and Elizabeth Easton, the former chair of the Department of European Painting at the Brooklyn Museum, the Center for Curatorial Leadership welcomed its first class of fellows in 2008.

“Robin’s passionate commitment to art and contemporary artists, her intense involvement with scholarship, and her belief in the importance of arts institutions have led to this high honor,” noted Midge Bowman, Frye Art Museum executive director. “We are very proud of her.”

As chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections at the Frye, Held’s dual mandate is to revitalize the Museum’s collection of nineteenth-century German art and to increase its commitment to contemporary art. She has curated more than 100 exhibitions including Empire (2008); Heaven is Being a Memory to Others (2008); Hug: Recent Work by Patricia Piccinini (2007); Swallow Harder: Selections from the Collection of Ben and Aileen Krohn (2006); and The Retrofuturistic Universe of NSK (2005). Prior to joining the Frye in 2005, Held was associate curator at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington. Among her accomplishments there were the traveling exhibitions Hershmanlandia: The Contemporary Art and Films of Lynn Hersham Leeson, 1965-2005 (2005), and Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics (2002). Held has published widely on art in Eastern Europe, performance art and its relation to documentation, projected art, and biological art in an age of bioterrorism. She was a 2003 Getty Grant Program Curatorial Research Fellow for Hershmanlandia and a 2006 Goethe-Institute Visiting Scholar, Munich Germany.

CCL Class of 2009 participants were selected by a panel of leading museum directors and will begin the program on January 5, 2009, with instruction by Graduate School of Business at Columbia University and top museum directors, administrators and trustees from around the country. All costs are fully funded by CCL. In addition to Held, CCL fellows for 2009 are:

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston

Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator of 19th Century European Painting
Art Institute of Chicago

Maxwell Hearn, Douglas Dillon Curator, Department of Asian Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Eik Kahng, Curator and Head of the Department of 18th and 19th Century Art
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Mary-Kay Lombino, The Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Pougkeepsie

Kevin Salatino, Curator and Department Head, Prints and Drawings
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Britt Salvesen, Director and Chief Curator
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson

Rochelle Steiner, Director
Public Art Fund, New York

Matthew Welch, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs, Curator of Japanese and Korean Art
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The CCL program will provide all participants with managerial skills from high-level administrators in important American museums. Each scholar will be mentored for the entire six-month fellowship. Studies commence in January 2009 and include intensive courses at Columbia University in New York in non-profit management, finance, fundraising, board development, long-range and short-term planning, cultural properties law and other pertinent subjects. A one-week residency at a major museum different from each curator’s home institution will follow in the spring. CCL fellows will also join in executive leadership seminars with directors, trustees, and curators to discuss issues currently facing the museum world.

“The members of the Class of 2009 exemplify the high values and priceless abilities of the finest curators across the United States,” stated CCL co-founder Agnes Gund. “They are already leaders in their own fields. With CCL’s help, they will prove their capacity for leadership across the board.