Welcome to 2024! I’m very excited to write to you as I launch my first full year as John and Mary Pappajohn Director of the Des Moines Art Center. Over the last several months, I have been reflecting on past accomplishments and working with our staff, trustees, and community stakeholders to plan the final quarter of the Art Center’s first 100 years of existence. The collision of past, present, and future has prompted me to consider just what makes this institution so unique among art museums in the United States: besides caring for a cherished public amenity—the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park—and three architectural landmarks, the Art Center also maintains an art school, one through which over 3,000 adults and children walked in 2023.
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Transforming the Art Center in the 21st Century, a comprehensive campaign in celebration of the Art Center’s upcoming 75th anniversary in 2023, announced its public phase in the fall of 2021. In July of 2019,...
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I write this, my first introduction to the Art Center’s printed newsletter, from New York, where I’m currently finishing my tenure as The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of...
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