Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre outdoor museum, announced on Tuesday that Nora Lawrence, its artistic director and chief curator, will succeed its president, John P. Stern, as the institution’s leader in January. It also announced a series of commissions and acquisitions, and a solo show by the Brazilian visual artist Sonia Gomes.
It is the first time that Storm King — founded in 1960 by Stern’s grandfather, Ralph E. Ogden, and father, H. Peter Stern, in New Windsor, N.Y. — will be stewarded by someone from outside their family.
In choosing Storm King’s inaugural executive director, the board decided to forgo a typical search and unanimously select Lawrence, who rose through the ranks over 13 years, starting as an associate curator.
“There is no one more qualified to take the helm than Nora Lawrence, with whom I’ve had the privilege of working closely and whose artistic vision has helped make Storm King the international destination that it is today,” Stern wrote in a statement. He took the reins from his father in 2008 and now, at age 64, will transition to a position as the board’s president and senior adviser; his two sisters also serve on the board of the nonprofit organization.
The generational change — Lawrence is 45 — is part of the “transformation from Storm King being a wonderful, family-led organization to becoming increasingly a more public-facing organization in every way,” said Adam D. Weinberg, a Storm King board member, who stepped down as director of the Whitney Museum last year.
Lawrence has demonstrated “how one can sensitively balance the history of the organization and breadth of permanent works,” Weinberg said, with “how to make it current, fresh, diverse and more open.”
Raised in New York City, with a family home 20 minutes from Storm King, which she visited frequently as a child, Lawrence worked in the Museum of Modern Art’s painting and sculpture department with its chief curator, Ann Temkin, for six years before being hired by Stern in 2011.
“In the time I’ve been at Storm King, land and landscape have taken on many new connotations for artists, who are interested in uncovering human histories of landscape, geologic histories and longer-term questions, given climate change,” Lawrence said in an interview. “There are so many different perspectives I’m excited to see at Storm King.”
The transition comes amid the completion of a campus upgrade, a $53 million capital project, to be fully accessible to the public in May. Annual attendance during Stern’s tenure increased to 140,000 from 43,000, spiking during the pandemic. The upgrade is expected to increase the annual operating budget of $9.1 million by 1 percent, Lawrence said. (A $34 million endowment remains unchanged.)
Visitors will soon be welcomed through accessible entrance pavilions with amenities, designed by heneghan peng architects and WXY. Three former parking lots on the campus have been transformed by the landscape architects Gustafson Porter + Bowman and Reed Hilderbrand, who introduced more than 650 trees to promote biodiversity and shade.
A temporary commission by Kevin Beasley will inaugurate one of these reclaimed natural spaces. And Gomes’s first U.S. solo museum show will open there in May.
The artist Dionne Lee will debut her first outdoor sculpture as part of a program called Outlooks that Lawrence initiated early in her career at Storm King. Since the program began, it has invited emerging and midcareer artists like Brandon Ndife, Jean Shin and Virginia Overton to create temporary projects.
During her tenure, Lawrence has steered ambitious site-specific permanent commissions by Sarah Sze and Martin Puryear that recently joined cornerstone works by David Smith, Henry Moore, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson and Alexander Calder, among others in the outdoor sculpture collection numbering about 115 works, nearly 80 percent of which are on view.
Lawrence has also programmed a rotation of large-scale exhibitions, opening each May, by artists including Lynda Benglis, Wangechi Mutu and Arlene Shechet. Two new acquisitions, from Shechet’s exhibition this year and from Lee Ufan, will be integrated into the campus installation next spring.
Rashid Johnson, who has worked with Lawrence on projects at Storm King, said she was the “obvious choice.” (Johnson was not involved in the decision.)
“Nora is so committed to the place and so in tune with the artists who have been active there more recently,” Johnson said, adding that Storm King is one of the most interesting and attractive places for an artist to show work. “It’s incredibly validating to be in that context.”
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