Michael E. Shapiro, director of the High Museum of Art for the past 15 years, is moving on. He plans to leave the job on July 31, 2015, the end of the fiscal year.
Shapiro, 64, oversaw unprecedented growth of the High’s collections, endowment and audience, raised the museum’s national and international profile, and reaffirmed the High’s role as a leading Southeastern museum. Let’s look at some specifics. His tenure included:
- Completion of a 177,000-square-foot, three-building expansion.
- Groundbreaking collaborations like Louvre Atlanta.
- Doubling the number of works in the High’s permanent collection.
- Raising nearly $230 million, including $20 million for acquisitions and increasing the endowment by almost 30 percent.
- Ensuring that the High’s collecting departments — African art, modern and contemporary art, folk and self-taught art, photography, and museum interpretation — have fully endowed curatorial positions.
- Leading the acquisition of works by Radcliffe Bailey, Romare Bearden, Mary Cassatt, Chuck Close, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claude Monet, Julie Mehretu, Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, Camille Pissarro and Joseph Stella, among others.
- Helping build the photography collection, which includes one of the nation’s most comprehensive collections of civil rights-era photos.
- Helping collect important works by Eugène Atget, William Christenberry, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among others.
Shapiro, who joined the High’s leadership team in 1995 and became director in 2000, simply decided the museum was in a great position to find a new leader. He’ll spend his days as an independent consultant specializing in professional development, best practices and collaborations. The High’s board of directors, meanwhile, is forming a search committee to look nationally and internationally for his successor.
