Stanford’s Cantor Arts names its new director
After a yearlong international search, Stanford University has hired a new director for its popular Cantor Arts Center.
Susan Dackerman, a German Renaissance scholar, will be named Friday as the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, as the university museum is formally known.
Dackerman, 53, comes from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where she has worked for two years, following 10 years as curator of prints at the Harvard Art Museums.
This is her first museum directorship, and she has tasked herself with doing the heretofore undoable — getting Silicon Valley behind visual arts in general and the Cantor in specific.
“I want to figure out ways to connect the museum to the technology community both on campus and in the area,” Dackerman said Thursday by phone, while at Harvard to research a book. “It seems like a prime environment to see how to make technology work for the arts and humanities.”
She replaces Connie Wolf, a Stanford graduate and San Francisco museum veteran who seemed to be perfect for the job when she was hired in 2012. But Wolf left abruptly after less than five years. Prior to that, Tom Seligman had served a tenure of 20 years as director.
Dackerman grew up in Valley Stream on New York’s Long Island and earned a bachelor’s degree in art history at Vassar College, class of 1986, and a doctorate in the history of art at Bryn Mawr College in 1995.
While studying at Bryn Mawr she secured an internship at Harvard Art Museums, “which convinced me I wanted to have a museum career rather than an academic career,” she said. “I liked the idea of being able to make a public version as well as a scholarly version of art history.”
Dackerman starts Sept. 18 and plans to commute by bicycle to work from faculty housing at Stanford West on Sand Hill Road, near Stanford Shopping Center. She plans to commute by plane to Los Angeles on weekends.
Her partner, Helen Molesworth, is chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and they plan to maintain their home in the mid-Wilshire neighborhood there.
The Cantor is free and is one of the most widely visited university museums in the country, with 250,000 visitors a year.