Courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum
Patrick Moore, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will step down from his place on Could 31. He stated the rationale was he deliberate to relocate to Spain along with his husband.
Moore has been director of the Warhol Museum since 2017. He first joined the group as its director of growth earlier than shortly being promoted to deputy director in September 2012. Previous to the Warhol Museum, Moore spent 10 years with the Alliance for the Arts in New York, the place he was the creator and undertaking director of the Property Undertaking.
Throughout Moore’s time as director, the establishment proposed a $45 million growth plan final yr that may improve the establishment’s footprint by greater than 60 %, in addition to its $60 million “Pop District” initiative.
The ten-year Pop District initiative would span 5 blocks across the museum in Pittsburgh’s North Shore and would come with a “public artwork initiative, a youth-focused, artistic economic system workforce program, flagship reside occasion & efficiency venue.”
The Pop District particularly has confirmed significantly controversial amongst employees on the museum, in response to WESA, Pittsburgh’s native NPR station. “The museum has been taken over by the alien that’s the Pop District,” one unnamed worker instructed WESA in a report that ran this past December.
That report additionally famous that Moore’s administration model had spurred employees members to depart. In accordance with WESA, “most of [the museum’s] highest-ranking employees” had left amid the Pop District plan, reportedly due to their lack of involvement in it.
Moore denied this, telling WESA, “The complete senior employees of the museum has been concerned with the Pop District from day one.”
A separate controversy has plagued the museum prior to now month. In February, Hyperallergic reported that employees on the museum had criticized a label that referred to the October 7 Hamas assault as “the beginning of the Center East battle.” That textual content, which was authored by Moore and chief curator Aaron Levi Garvey, didn’t point out Israel’s struggle in Gaza. However by the point the controversy transcended the museum, making it into the native press after the Instagram account Change the Museum posted in regards to the label, it appeared that Levi Garvey had left the establishment, along with his LinkedIn web page suggesting that he now not held that place, according to the Pittsburgh City Paper.
There had additionally been scrutiny over a 2023 exhibition of Warhol’s work that the museum organized in Saudi Arabia. Pittsburgh Unbiased reported in 2022 that Moore and the Warhol Museum did not disclose that the establishment had acquired a payment for doing the present.
“My 13 years at The Warhol have been essentially the most formative of my life, and I’m so grateful for having been given this chance,” Moore stated in a press statement launched by the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh on March 14. “After having had a sabbatical in 2023 the place my husband and I had been in a position to spend three months at our residence in Spain, I’ve determined our future is there, in his residence nation.”
Moore stated he was glad to be leaving “on the excessive observe of the museum’s thirtieth anniversary and the opening of my KAWS + Warhol exhibition.”
After Could 31, Deputy director Rachel Baron-Horn will function interim director of the Warhol Museum whereas Carnegie Museums of PIttsburgh searches for Moore’s alternative.
Information of Moore’s departure was first reported by Hyperallergic.