Wayne State University in Detroit has named Linda Downs, CAA executive director and chief executive officer, as one of five recipients of its 2012 Arts Achievement Awards. The awards, which are given to school alumni at any stage of their career, honor a passionate dedication to their chosen field. Downs earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Monteith College at Wayne State in 1968. She also taught as an adjunct professor in the university’s Department of Art and Art History from 1976 to 1989.
The awards reception and program took place on April 13, 2012, at the school’s Alumni House. The four other honorees were: Kendall Smith, a lighting designer for the Michigan Opera House (class of 1982); Sonya Tayeh, a choreographer and dancer (class of 2002); Lisa Vallee-Smith, a public-relations consultant (class of 1984); and the Magenta Giraffe Theatre Company, a Detroit community theater founded in 2008 by three school alumni.
Downs joins a list of illustrious past recipients, including a 1998 winner, Arthur C. Danto, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University in New York and a longtime art critic for the Nation (class of 1948). Like Danto, Downs has worn many hats during her four-decade career as a curator, educator, scholar, and administrator. Prior to her appointment as CAA executive director in 2006, she led the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, during which time she oversaw the museum’s privatization and subsequent expansion into a 100,000-square-foot building, designed by the architect David Chipperfield. In 2005, with Wanda Corn and Patricia McDonnell, Downs organized the museum’s inaugural exhibition in its new space, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935. From 1989 to 2002, she was head of education at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and before that worked as curator of education at the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1976 to 1989.
Downs has published articles on art-museum education and was an educational consultant for public-school projects in Detroit, Davenport, and Washington, DC. She also served on the Getty Education Center’s Discipline-Based Art Education Project. A scholar of twentieth-century Mexican art, Downs curated two shows devoted to Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts: Diego Rivera: A Retrospective in 1986, with Ellen Sharp; and The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera in 1978, with Mary Jane Jacob. Downs explored a surprising chapter in the history of arts patronage with her 1999 book, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals, a close look at the artist’s controversial murals commissioned by Edsel Ford in 1932 for the Detroit Institute of Arts.
A tireless campaigner for art organizations, Downs has served on many national nonprofit boards and acted as a consultant to art museums throughout the United States, Mexico, Australia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia. She currently serves as secretary of the National Humanities Alliance’s board of directors.
Top image: Linda Downs was presented her award by John Richardson, chairperson of the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State (photograph by Janine Pixley, Wayne State University)
