BALTIMORE — Christopher Bedford, the at-times controversial director of the Baltimore Museum of Art who brooked no opposition in his quest to use his institution to achieve social change, has resigned his post and is moving to California.
Bedford, 44, will become director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an institution with roughly a third of the BMA’s 95,000 artworks, but about five times its annual $20 million budget.
The museum’s board of trustees was notified Wednesday that Bedford’s last day will be June 3. Trustees are expected to name an interim director and will conduct a “rigorous and expansive search” for Bedford’s successor, board chairwoman Clair Zamoiski Segal wrote in a letter to the BMA’s board of trustees, staff members and supporters.
In the six years that Bedford has guided Maryland’s largest museum, he has shaken it up from its basement to its eaves as he sought to transform the BMA into an institution that better reflects the majority population of the city in which it is located.
Many initiatives made national headlines.
Some, such as the decision to buy only artworks created by women painters and sculptors during 2020, The Year of the Woman, were widely acclaimed. Others, such as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to sell three modern masterworks to raise $55 million for diversity initiatives, caused a deep rift within Baltimore and brought an avalanche of negative publicity upon the museum.
“I believe that the work that the board and staff of the Baltimore Museum of Art and I have done over the last six years has fundamentally changed the DNA of this institution,” Bedford said. “I have immense pride in what we have accomplished and a sadness that come June, I won’t be part of that anymore.”
Bedford was born in Scotland and has lived in England and South Africa. From the beginning, he said he didn’t expect to spend the rest of his career in Baltimore. When he was appointed, Bedford promised trustees that he would give the BMA at least five years; he departs after six.
Perhaps because Bedford knew his time in Baltimore was limited, the former Oberlin College nose tackle pursued his plans to transform the BMA with a single-minded drive and determination and embarked upon what in museum terms was a blistering pace of change.
Less than three months into his new job, Bedford catapulted the BMA onto an international stage when it was selected to create the American pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale, often described as “the art world Olympics.” It was the first time since 1960 that the BMA had been chosen for that honor.
Other high-profile programs include a satellite museum at Lexington Market that combines galleries and an art-making space, and a partnership with the Greenmount West Community Center that teaches silk-screening skills to at-risk kids and raises funds for the neighborhood organization located within a few miles of the BMA.
And in March, the BMA will open a new exhibit that’s already generating media buzz: “Guarding the Art,” a show curated by the museum’s security guards — a project conceived by trustee Amy Elias and chief BMA curator Asma Naaem. He also championed local artists of color, boosting the careers of such promising painters as Jerrell Gibbs and the mixed-media artist Stephen Towns.
In San Francisco, Bedford will lead a museum that has had its own share of well-publicized struggles with diversity. A senior curator resigned in 2020 after his comments created a public uproar; he had stated that a museum policy of avoiding collecting artworks by white men amounts to “reverse discrimination.”
Bedford declined to comment on what plans, if any, he has for SFMOMA. But he said his new museum “holds dear two principles that are enormously important to me: a commitment to equity and excellence in its broadest definition. SFMOMA wants to continue to be known for leading the field in those areas, and that aspiration attracted me tremendously.”
In a statement, the San Francisco museum’s search committee described Bedford as “a brave, empathic, inclusive and passionate leader,” and added: “He is at a point in his career that combines impressive achievements with an open mindset and the ability to listen, learn and evolve with and for our community.”
Segal praised Bedford’s “courageous and inspired leadership” in her letter to museum supporters.
“It is through his leadership that we reinvigorated our mission in 2018 to transform the BMA into a museum that places diversity and equity alongside artistic excellence at its core and better reflects the community that it serves,” the letter says. “It is this vision that has guided us over the past several years and one that will continue to guide our work into the future. We are grateful to Christopher for setting us on this essential path.”
Segal will wrap up her seven years as board chairwoman in June. She will be succeeded by James D. Thornton, who will become the BMA’s first Black board chairman.
While many of Bedford’s boldest projects have come to fruition, others remain works in progress.
After the sale of three artworks by Andy Warhol, Clyfford Still and Brice Marden was called off two hours before they were scheduled to go under the gavel at Sotheby’s Auction House in New York on Oct. 28, 2020, Bedford vowed to raise raise the $55 million the sale had been expected to generate and to use the funds for diversity and access initiatives, an initiative dubbed The Endowment for the Future.
Bedford said that fundraising for this endowment is continuing, but declined to say how much money has been pledged so far. Nonetheless, he said that the museum “has made substantive progress” in most categories for which those funds were to have been earmarked.
The pay for security guards has been bumped up from $13.50 an hour in the middle of the pandemic to $16 now. Bedford acknowledged that the figure falls short of his original target of $20 an hour, but said, “In the next five years, $20 an hour is achievable.”
The BMA will begin opening on Thursday nights in March to accommodate visitors who work during the day, and is tentatively planning to stop charging for special exhibitions in the fall of 2026, 20 years after eliminating its general admission fee.
“The most important thing to me was to move from representation to embodiment,” Bedford said. “It isn’t enough to just hang paintings by artists of color in our galleries. We have to create the world depicted in those paintings. We have to embody those values of equity, access and inclusion inside the museum’s walls.”
Bedford said that he’s not worried that a new director will have different priorities, and that the plans he set in motion will be abandoned once he leaves town.
“I do not believe the pendulum is going to swing in the opposite direction,” he said.
“Initially, the work the BMA was doing reflected my vision. That is emphatically no longer the case. In the past six years, the staff and board to a person have come together around a very deeply shared set of principles. The museum doesn’t need me to do that good work.”
Segal said in her letter that she doesn’t expect the BMA to change course.
Trustees remain “committed to the equity goals that we have set forth, and this commitment does not change with Christopher’s departure,” her letter says. “Senior leadership is prepared to carry forward our mission and bring to fruition many of the forward-thinking projects currently underway.”
Bedford knows that hiring a new director is the prerogative of the BMA’s board and that he will play no role in the search. But if asked, he has a few candidates he will suggest be considered.
“I would hope they would consult me,” he said. “I can be a resource, and I do have some candidate ideas I would like to share.”
Does he have candidates of color on his list? Should the BMA’s next director be Black?
“The short answer,” Bedford said, “is emphatically ‘yes.’”
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