Berkeley museum hires new director
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has named Julie Rodrigues Widholm as the museum’s next director, filling a vacancy left by the departure this year of Lawrence Rinder.
Widholm, 45, plans to come to the Bay Area in August from Chicago, where she spent five years as head of the DePaul Art Museum. Under her tenure, the museum grew in scale — adding more than 500 works to a 3,000work collection and increasing attendance by 40% — and acquired a reputation for its emphasis on increasing the visibility of underrepresented artists.
“Honestly, there are very few places and jobs that could have lured me away from Chicago after 23 years,” Widholm told The Chronicle in an exclusive phone interview. “But Berkeley and BAMPFA is one.
“I’ve long admired the program,” she said. “I’m excited about the new building. And I appreciate how BAMPFA has always played a role in its local context, developing art history in relation to the Bay Area and connecting it to the larger world.”
Widholm arrives at a critical juncture in the museum’s history. Four years ago, the institution moved into an opulent and widely acclaimed new $112 million home on the western edge of the UC Berkeley campus. Now the museum, like nearly all arts institutions, has been forced by the coronavirus pandemic to close for an indefinite period.
Widholm embraces this as an opportunity for the museum to find an innovative way forward.
“What does reopening look like? How are we going to pivot to more digital programming?” she said. “I think it’s a new frontier, and I’m kind of excited to consider how we can engage with audiences who can’t physically come to the museum, which connects to questions about accessibility in general.”
At DePaul, Widholm helped put a young institution, founded in 2011, on the map. She oversaw an ambitious curatorial program focused on artists — including women, LGBTQ artists and artists of color — who had long been underserved by conventional approaches. She personally curated solo exhibitions of artists, including Whitney Bradshaw, Eric J. Garcia, Karolina Gnatowski and Betsy Odom.
Last year, a survey of art from the 1960s and ‘70s titled “New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival” garnered widespread attention and prompted the Chicago Tribune to name her a “Chicagoan of the Year.” Before leaving DePaul, Widholm launched a multiyear initiative to address the underrepresentation of Latinx artists.
Widholm’s longtime interest in championing diversity and inclusion, she said, made for a natural fit between herself and BAMPFA.
“I’m talking about expanding the canon and giving a platform to artists who have been excluded,” Widholm said. “It means looking at the colonialist roots of the traditional museum model and thinking about the choices we make in what to present.”
Board President Catherine P. Koshland, who chaired the search committee that hired Widholm, said her commitment to diversity was one of the key influences on the decision. But she said Widholm’s management style also played a role.
“She struck us as someone who could lead the museum and at the same time support the curatorial staff and give them space to pursue their own vision,” Koshland said. “She’s a very inquisitive person who asks a lot of questions, including very detailed ones. She can get into the weeds without being a micromanager, and that’s not a skill everyone has.”
Widholm credited some of her global outlook to a widely traveled childhood. The daughter of a U.S. Army officer, she was raised in a range of American cities as well as Portugal, Mozambique and Brazil before winding up in Illinois for undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her formative years as a curator were spent at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
At DePaul, she found herself in an institution with a university affiliation not unlike BAMPFA’s and used it to foster an interdisciplinary approach.
“I believe an academic art museum does its best work through an interdisciplinary lens,” she said. “We had music and dance people appear in the galleries, and we drew on the university as a teaching resource. Art is about life, and museums can engage in all sorts of conversations around it.”
Widholm will be coming to Berkeley with her husband, a landscape designer, and their two teenage children. One snag may be her Twitter account, where she uses the geographically specific handle @chicagocurator.
“Yeah, I may have to change that,” she said. “Or I might just delete the account altogether.”