Former Stedelijk Director Beatrix Ruf Is Joining the Curatorial Staff of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow

Moscow’s Garage Museum of
Contemporary Art has hired Beatrix Ruf, the former
director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, to join its staff in
a high-level curatorial capacity.

Anton Belov, director of the
Garage, has said that he will work with Ruf on developing a
long-term vision for the museum, according to Artforum. She will take over many of the
responsibilities previously held by former chief curator Kate
Fowle, who left Garage in
June to lead MoMA PS1 in
New York. 

Ruf, who resigned from the
Stedelijk amid controversy in 2017, will be responsible for programming at the
museum, including upcoming exhibitions, a year-long concert series,
and the museum’s annual Garage International Conference, a
series of educational lectures on contemporary Russian art. She
will also oversee the launch of a new publication,
The Garage Journal,
and several new initiatives aimed
at strengthening the institution’s relationship to migrants in
Moscow.

One of Europe’s most influential
curators, Ruf served as director of the Kunsthalle Zurich from 2001
until 2014, when she was appointed the head of the Stedelijk. In
2017, she was ensnared in controversy when a Dutch newspaper
published a report detailing how the director had simultaneously
operated a private consultancy—netting her $500
million annually—while leading the Amsterdam institution. Two weeks
later, she stepped down from her position.

Ruf maintained that the
incident was a “misunderstanding,” and
that her consultancy had been approved by the Stedelijk board. She
also claimed that the income reported in the newspaper was inflated
due to a bonus she received for work done prior to her job at the
museum. Eight months after her resignation, a private 120-page
report funded by the Municipality of Amsterdam found that
Ruf was “wrongly
accused” of a conflict
of interest. 

Days after the report went
public, three Stedelijk members resigned in an
effort to “end the turmoil” at the institution. Earlier this year, the museum issued a puzzling
press release noting
that it had made amends with the curator, who called her time at
the museum a “happy memory.”

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the Curatorial Staff of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in
Moscow appeared first on artnet News.