Museum News > In Transition: Dr. Flora Kaplan

In Transition: Dr. Flora Kaplan

Dahesh Museum Director, Flora Kaplan, welcomes guests with Domenic Iocono, Director of SUGalleries, at Syracuse University Lubin House/ Palitz Gallery in New York City, for their inaugural partnership at the opening reception for In Pursuit of the Exotic, March 28, 2009.

Flora Edouwaye Kaplan, Interim Director, left the Dahesh Museum of Art on May 1st, 2009, having led a three-year period of transition beginning 2006, and culminating with a long-term master plan crafted with the Board of Trustees, which included re-hiring Dr. David Farmer to serve as Director of Exhibitions, a role he assumed this summer.

During her tenure, the Museum was actively engaged in mounting exhibitions, publishing catalogs and re-issuing its popular books. These included Napoleon on the Nile, A Distant Muse, Academic Allure, Gustave Doré's Fantasy and Faith, and Charles Bargue's Drawing Manual. Under her stewardship, there was an increase in national and international loans, and in the development of new membership events, public programs, and traveling exhibitions.

Dr. Kaplan was tasked to survey sites for the Museum's permanent home in Manhattan. She implemented an earlier Board decision to leave its luxurious rental quarters at 580 Madison Avenue in a runaway market, and to husband its resources for the downturn and opportunities to come. In 2008, a new partnership of the Dahesh Museum of Art and Syracuse University in Manhattan and its upstate home campus was begun, and emerges as a viable model for other mid-size art museums. Dr. Kaplan, Emerita Professor, is an art and museum specialist, formerly a curator at The Brooklyn Museum, and the founding director of the post-graduate Program in Museum Studies, Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University.

In 2009, Dr. Kaplan was honored for her distinguished contributions to anthropology and museology in an Alumni Achievement Awards ceremony of the Ph.D. Programs of The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She returns to writing and academic pursuits, and will continue to consult with the Dahesh Museum of Art Board of Trustees

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