The Newark Museum of Art has appointed the cultural leader Lisa Funderburke as its next director and chief executive, it said on Thursday.
She succeeds Linda C. Harrison, who stepped down last spring after six years at the helm.
The art museum, founded in 1909, is New Jersey’s biggest, with 153 employees and a global collection ranked 12th largest nationally with more than 300,000 objects and strengths in Tibetan and Native American art. It presents a much larger platform for Funderburke.
Since 2016, she had served as president and chief executive of Artist Communities Alliance, an international service organization for artist residencies, that operates remotely and which, under her direction, increased its staff to 13 and its annual budget to $2.5 million. She was previously associate director of the McColl Center in Charlotte, N.C., and, before that, led the Charlotte Museum of Nature.
She starts at the Newark Museum on Monday.
Funderburke was selected from among several dozen candidates nationwide. The chair of the museum’s board, Peter Englot, said the search committee saw her as an energetic leader who could work with “a broad collection like ours that crosses the arts and science,” and who could “continue to raise consciousness about voices and perspectives that need to be elevated.”
A native of Long Island, N.Y., with undergraduate and master’s degrees in science from Howard University, Funderburke said, “It’s a good time to apply my experience to a very specific place at a very specific moment, at a museum that I think is quite magical in how it shows up for the community.”
The museum, with an endowment of $48.5 million and annual attendance exceeding 100,000 visitors, has achieved greater local visibility in recent years by hosting weekly events like dance parties and fashion shows. It has an operating budget of $15 million, with two-thirds of that coming from the city and state.
The museum has benefited indirectly from federal funds that flow to New Jersey but that are jeopardized in the current political climate. Englot said, “We need to inspire new generations of philanthropists.”
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