The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston announced Wednesday that it has selected Nora Burnett Abrams, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, as its next director.
Abrams succeeds Jill Medvedow, who is stepping down at the end of March. (Her departure had been announced in 2023.) In her 26-year-tenure as ICA director, Medvedow, 70, led its transformation from a small exhibition space with 10,000 to 20,000 visitors a year to a nationally recognized collecting institution that drew more than 300,000 visitors in 2022-23.
She spearheaded its expansion into a larger building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that opened in 2006 and helped spur redevelopment of Boston’s waterfront. She also led the creation of ICA Watershed, a seasonal exhibition space in a former factory in East Boston, across Boston Harbor, which opened in 2018.
At the Denver museum, Abrams, 46, rose through the curatorial ranks for a decade before being appointed director, in 2019. She will begin in her new post on May 1. She inherits a museum on strong financial footing, with a budget of $18.7 million and an endowment of $65.4 million.
“Nora’s proven herself in Denver to be a super collaborative, empathetic, responsible leader with a real commitment to civic life and audience engagement,” Steven D. Corkin, co-chair of the ICA board and part of the search committee, said in an interview. “She deepened the MCA Denver’s role as a catalyst in the community,” he added, citing Abrams’s opening of the MCA’s second space, in a 1926 theater in Denver’s Northside neighborhood. That project has parallels to the ICA Watershed.
“Museums in many ways are an amazing public square,” Abrams said, “and something we’ve been exploring at MCA Denver is how to be a place where dialogue and discourse can occur.” In terms of practice and experimentation, she continued, “I think I’ve built up that muscle memory that will be taken forward in Boston.”
A native of New York City, Abrams studied art history as an undergraduate at Stanford University. She received a master’s degree in modern art and critical studies at Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Abrams worked in the director’s office at the Museum of Modern Art and trained under the modern and contemporary art curator Nan Rosenthal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before moving to Denver. There, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized more than 40 exhibitions of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Senga Nengudi and Tara Donovan. While she was director, the museum’s endowment increased by 30 percent, and she also implemented a racial equity plan.
Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (who was not involved in the selection), described the ICA’s choice as honoring “Jill Medvedow’s extraordinary contribution to the museum field, especially her focus on community and civic engagement.” Abrams, she added, “is a worthy successor as an emergent leader who has made it her business to bridge different perspectives through the lens of art and culture.”
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