The work of curating and directing a museum or art gallery isn’t that much different than curating and directing a website. For a lot of local art spaces, images and text are swapped on a monthly basis for more images and text—abstraction swapped for realism, the name and mission statement of Artist A swapped for those of Artist B—and the previous exhibit remains only in dated announcements, rumor and memory, like a series of Google links to dead websites.
 Jill Hartz, once a C-VILLE 20, has now been demoted from her former title as director of the UVA Arts Museum. |
Example: Dig through the University of Virginia’s archived Top News and UVA Today releases and use the phrase “Art Museum” to narrow your search. In Top News, you might dig up a September 9, 1997, article about Jill Hartz, who left her position as director of public relations at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in 1993 and took a position as director of communications at UVA’s Arts and Sciences Development Office in 1994. Hartz began work as interim director of the Bayly Art Museum in January 1997, and accepted a position as the director of the museum in September of the same year following the departure of Anthony G. Hirschel.
More searches reveal loads of Hartz’s comments on exhibits she’s curated during her 10-year term as director of the museum. The one bit of art news that you won’t find a trace of among gallery or Google is when, precisely, Hartz lost the clear-cut title of director.
But search again. While the McIntire Department of Art website still lists Hartz as director, the UVA Art Museum’s website lists “Beth Turner” as interim director.
Sound familiar? Elizabeth Hutton Turner, who received bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in art history from UVA, was hired in September 2007 as a University professor, according to a press release from UVA Today. A subsequent press release from UVA Today (dated December 11) announced that Turner would assume the position of vice provost for the arts, a new position created to oversee both the UVA Art Museum and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection as well as the general direction of the arts at UVA.
Turner did not return calls by press time, Hartz was not available for comment and e-mails and calls to the McIntire Art Department were not returned. Thankfully, like a placard left after a painting was removed, the Internet retains a few signs of some changing of the guard in UVA’s Art Department. In a post on his blog (www.artpark.typepad.com) titled “Shake Up at UVA Art Museum,” Migration gallery owner Rob Jones made a comment that no one, at present, seems quite able to address: “There’s been an administrative shake up at the Museum.”
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