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The director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Michael Brand, has announced he will step down from his position in July 2025, triggering a national and international search for his successor.
Much of Brand’s tenure was spent driving the gallery’s redevelopment project, Sydney Modern, which doubled the institution’s exhibition capacity by partnering the original neo-Classical edifice with a new contemporary building just metres away to the north.
The Sydney Modern project was completed in December 2023.
“Record visitation to the expanded art museum surpassed two million in the first year of operation, placing the Art Gallery among the world’s top 30 most-visited art museums,” a statement from the gallery said today. “Total visitation since the completion of the project now exceeds four million.”
Brand joined the AGNSW in June 2012 as its ninth director, following Edmund Capon.
Before joining the AGNSW, Brand led the Aga Khan Museum during its construction in Toronto. Before that, he was director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from 2005 to 2010, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from 2000 to 2005.
He began his career as curator of Asian art at the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra, in 1988. “A scholar of Indian and Islamic art, architecture and landscape design, Dr Brand has been a member of the Bizot Group of International Art Museum Directors since 2005,” the gallery’s statement said.
The president of the gallery’s board of trustees, David Gonski, praised Brand’s “ambition and vision to create a globally significant art museum in Sydney”.
Gonski completes his term in December 2024, expanding the power vacuum at the gallery until it can transition to new leadership.
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