High-Profile Curator Tim Marlow Is Leaving the Royal Academy to Run London’s Design Museum

Two of London’s largest museums are undergoing a change in
leadership. Tim Marlow, the artistic director of the Royal Academy
of Arts, has announced that he is leaving the 250-year-old, artist-run
institution to become the new director of the city’s
Design Museum.

The high-profile curator and prolific broadcaster
succeeds the architecture journalist turned museum director
Deyan Sudjic and his co-director Alice Black, who announced they
were stepping down last week. Together, the duo oversaw the Design
Museum’s move in 2016 to a 1960s Modernist building in the heart of
an upmarket neighborhood in Kensington. Both proved noticeably
media shy last year when faced with a protest by designers and
artists upset that the Design Museum was hosting a private
reception for an arms dealer while their politically engaged
works were on view in the galleries nearby.

Marlow’s ability to work with artists will be an asset in
building (and mending) bridges with those who were alienated by the
Design Museum directors’ decision to accept money from such a
controversial source. The museum’s chairman is the Labour
politician Peter Mandelson, who has faced criticism for his
previous role as director of a Russian conglomerate with financial
stakes in the country’s defense industry.

Marlow joins at a critical time for the Design Museum, which
must be as entrepreneurial, if not more so, than the RA. Both
institutions have doubled their physical footprints in recent
years, increasing overheads considerably. Unlike the RA in its expanded home in
Piccadilly, which opened last year, the Design Museum has yet
to fully find its feet in its new space in the former
Commonwealth Institute, which overlooks Holland Park.

The outgoing artistic director is among a wave of recent
departures from the RA. The academy’s outgoing president, the
artist Christopher Le Brun, announced he would step down last
month, and its former chief executive Charles Saumarez Smith, who
departed last year and is now a director of BlainΙSouthern gallery.
The RA’s head of collections, Maurice Davies, also quietly departed
over the summer.

In a statement, Marlow said that becoming the chief executive
and director of the Design Museum “was a challenge I have found
impossible to resist.” One of those challenges will be navigating
the increasingly treacherous waters of corporate sponsorship and
maintaining curatorial independence. Unlike at the artist-run Royal
Academy, the Design Museum occasionally hosts exhibitions sponsored
by the very same brands that are the subject of its shows.

Another challenge will be determining how far to expand the
definition of “design,” and whether to stick close to the
traditional canon of furniture, graphic, and industrial design. In
2004, purists objected to a show about the flower designer
Constance Spry, claiming the museum was moving too far away from
serious design of manufactured objects. (The designer and museum
trustee James Dyson resigned in protest.) Marlow declined to say
whether he planned to embrace fine art alongside industrial design,
architecture, and film, as MoMA has done since the 1930s in New
York or M+ will do in Hong Kong.

Since he joined the RA six years ago, Marlow has overseen the
RA’s artistic program, which includes art and architecture, at a
time of unprecedented expansion for the venerable institution.
Blockbuster exhibitions under his watch have included shows of work
by Ai Weiwei, Jasper Johns, and Antony Gormley, as well as the
groundbreaking survey show of the arts of the Pacific, “Oceania,”
and novel pairings such as “Dalí/Duchamp.”

The RA’s new chief executive, Axel Rüger, who arrived from
Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in July, praised Marlow’s energy and
creativity. “I have very much enjoyed working with him and wish him
every success in his new role,” he said in a statement.

The post High-Profile Curator Tim Marlow Is Leaving the
Royal Academy to Run London’s Design Museum appeared first on
artnet News.