DIRECTOR AND CEO Linda C Harrison is departing the Newark Museum of Art on May 31, 2025. The museum announced Harrison is returning to the West Coast for “family reasons.” A search committee appointed by the museum’s board of trustees will conduct a national search for her successor.
The Newark Museum of Art is the largest museum in New Jersey with more than 130,000 artworks and about 170,000 science and natural history artifacts in its permanent collection. Harrison took the helm of the museum in 2018 and has been a leading figure beyond the institution, influencing the arts and culture landscape in the larger community.
Linda C. Harrison. | Courtesy Newark Museum of Art
“Linda has been a transformative leader of this anchor cultural institution and in six years, has taken it to a new level,” Newark Museum of Art Board Chair Peter Englot said in a statement.
“She has leveraged the museum’s illustrious history of national leadership in collecting from artists representing diverse global cultures, setting new standards for how museums everywhere can tell a more truthful story of who we are. She has developed a staff of museum professionals that is second to none in their knowledge, skills, and sensitivities for telling stories and allowing people of all backgrounds to see themselves in the exhibitions.”
Englot added: “As a result of her visionary and courageous leadership, the Newark Museum of Art today is nationally recognized as a thought leader. It is embraced locally as a beloved, inspirational catalyst of creativity.”
Prior to leading the Newark Museum of Art, Harrison served as director of the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Calif., from 2013 to 2018. Her background also incudes business and real estate experience.
Today, she is one of a handful of Black people leading a mainstream U.S. art museum. Her peers include Franklin Sirmans at Pérez Art Museum Miami; Andrea Barnwell Brownlee at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Fla.; Brooke A. Minto at Columbus Museum of Art; Belinda Tate at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields; and Sandra Jackson-Dumont at the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.
“Linda has been a transformative leader of this anchor cultural institution and in six years, has taken it to a new level.”
— Newark Museum of Art Board Chair Peter Englot
DURING HER TENURE at the Newark Museum of Art, Harrison has overseen a variety of defining projects. Shortly after she arrived, Harrison clarified the mission and focus of the museum. Well over a century after its founding in 1909, she instituted a name change, transforming the Newark Museum into the “Newark Museum of Art” in 2019.
After ushering the museum through the COVID pandemic, Harrison weathered another challenge. The museum came under public scrutiny in an open letter from curators and art historians after announcing plans to deaccession 17 works from its permanent collection. The museum said works by Thomas Cole, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Eakins, and Marsden Hartley, and others would to be sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.
The practice is frowned upon, but other museums had recently taken similar actions. The Newark Museum of Art and its peer institutions experienced financial setbacks in the wake of the pandemic. Given the climate in the sector, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) had relaxed guidelines on deaccessioning.
The Art Newspaper was among the many outlets that reported on the situation. In statement, Harrison said in part: “For our museum, with its 112-year history, we need to cast a critical eye on outdated and harmful narratives that have hung in our galleries without enough questions being asked. From here, we look toward righting previous misrepresentations and ensuring that as many voices as possible are heard. Our focus is to be a modern art institution that is an agent of change for diversity and inclusion in our community, state and nation.” The auction went forward on May 19, 2021, and the lots brought the museum nearly $6 million.
The Newark Museum of Art is sited on a 4.5 acre campus that includes a historic Old Stone School House, Alice Ransom Dreyfuss Memorial Garden, and Ballantine House, an 1885 mansion annexed to the museum. In 2023, the museum unveiled a $12 million renovation and reinterpretation of the Gilded Age mansion, with new period rooms, objects from the museum’s Decorative Arts collection, and art installations, including “Party Time: Reimagine America” (2009) by Yinka Shonibare, a sculptural work featuring headless mannequins wearing wax print clothing on view in the dining room.
YINKA SHONIBARE, CBE, “Party Time: Reimagine America,” 2009 (mixed media), Installation view Dining Room, Ballantine House, Newark Museum. | Purchase 2010 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund, 2010.5.1‑66. © Yinka Shonibare, CBE. Photo by Richard Goodbody
The museum’s facade also got a special enhancement last year when “Apollo (Diptych)” (2023), two marble busts by Sanford Biggers, were installed long term on either side of The Washington Street entrance to the museum, which faces Harriet Tubman Square.
Many works by Black artists have entered the museum’s permanent collection under Harrison’s leadership, including new acquisitions by potter David Drake (circa 1801-1870s); artists with connections to New Jersey, including Bisa Butler, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Leon Morton, Mickalene Thomas, and Mashell Black; and jewelry designer Johnny Nelson, among others.
Last year, the museum’s 18th and 19th century collection galleries were reinstalled for the first time since 2001 with broader representation of Black artists and Indigenous artists among the selections. The presentation features dialogues among historic and contemporary works. For example, Terence Hammonds’s Black Abolitionists Wallpaper (2022-23) adorns the walls in the circular gallery where “The Greek Slave” (1847), a white marble sculpture by Hiram Powers is installed.
Harrison worked with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka to establish a downtown Arts and Culture District in 2022. She is also a huge film fan and the Newark Museum of Art is the proud host of the annual Newark Black Film Festival, the oldest Black film festival in America, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year.
Currently, the Newark Museum of Art is embarking upon a $112 million Museum Parc project, a mixed-use reimagining of the museum campus. The project includes a new gallery space, more welcoming and accessible grounds, installation of public art, and 250 market-rate and affordable apartments. A major new expansion, the development project was recently approved by the city and is expected to break ground before Harrison’s departure.
“Leading The Newark Museum of Art has been a distinct honor. The museum is an intergenerational institution that serves our global community, and I have felt that profoundly from my first day here,” Harrison said in a statement.
“The role of museums continues to evolve in ever more relevant ways: from repositories of history to places where we gather to rediscover the past, understand the present, and imagine the future. It has been my distinct and ongoing joy to help tell a broader, more prosperous, and more inclusive story of our diverse America and ensure The Newark Museum of Art is a museum for all. Having just completed our next three-year strategic plan, 2025 will be the right time for a leadership transition. The museum is on a path to a strong future.” CT
Treasures of New Jersey: The Newark Museum of Art (2023) features Director and CEO Linda C. Harrison and others speaking about the museum, including its focus on community, education, and social justice, and the reinstallation of its historic collection galleries. | Video by PBS
FIND MORE About the Newark Museum of Art’s decision to deaccession works from its holdings and sell them at auction here, here, here, a post-sale report here, and background on the issue here
BOOKSHELF
“Seeing America: The Arc of Abstraction” was published to coincide with the museum’s reinstallation of its 20th and 21st century collection galleries. Also consider, “Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection,” “Beyond Zen: Japanese Buddhism Revealed: The Newark Museum of Art,” and “Newark Museum of Art (Images of America),” which was published last fall. Co-edited by Lisa Melandri and Naomi Beckwith, “Sanford Biggers” is the first publication to document the artist’s BAM series, including sculpture, video, and quilt paintings that memorialize and pay homage to Black victims of gun violence at the hand of police. The catalog accompanied Sanford Biggers 2019 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Recent publications of Sanford Biggers also include “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” which accompanied a traveling museum survey of his repurposed, mixed-media quilt works, and “Sanford Biggers: Martian Chronicles”
