CAA News
Linda Downs Is New CAA Executive Director
Linda Downs, executive director of the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, since 2002, has been appointed executive director of the College Art Association. She will begin work in late summer.
“I am honored to have this opportunity to serve CAA as executive director,” Downs said. “I look forward to gaining a greater understanding of the organization from the inside, focusing on member services and building on the comprehensive plan developed by the Board, committees, and staff.”
Linda Downs. Photograph provided by the Figge Art Museum.
Downs, who succeeds Susan Ball, will also represent CAA on a number of organizational boards and national advisory committees, including the Conference of Administrative Officers of the American Council of Learned Societies. She will be a spokesperson on issues related to education and freedom of expression and will strengthen CAA’s role in helping to shape the study and teaching of art and art history.
Downs oversaw the conversion of the Figge Art Museum from a municipal to a private institution and supervised the creation and opening of a new 100,000-square-feet building, designed by the British architect David Chipperfield. She also was instrumental in developing a strong series of historical and contemporary exhibitions at the museum and greatly enhanced other public programs and educational offerings. She helped to raise $18 million in private funds in three years.
From 1989 to 2002, Downs was head of education for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and served as curator of education at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Michigan from 1976 to 1989. She is a PhD candidate in cultural history at American University in Washington, D.C.; she also earned a master of arts in the history of art from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a bachelor of philosophy from Monteith College at Wayne State University in Detroit. Downs also attended the Museum Management Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. A teacher as well as an administrator, Downs was an adjunct professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University from 1976 to 1989. She has been a CAA member since her undergraduate days and served on the organization’s Education and Museum Committees in the 1990s.
Downs wrote Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (New York and Detroit: W. W. Norton and the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1999) and has organized several important exhibitions and authored their catalogues. A specialist in the modern art of Mexico, she was curator of two shows at the Detroit Institute of Arts: Diego Rivera: A Retrospective (1986; with Ellen Sharp), which traveled to Philadelphia, Mexico City, West Berlin, and London; and The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera (1978; with Mary Jane Jacobs). At the Figge, Downs organized the inaugural exhibition, entitled The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (2005; with Wanda Corn and Patricia McDonnell), which traveled to the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington.
“Linda Downs brings to CAA an extraordinary range of strengths that will make CAA’s role even more vital,” commented Nicola Courtright, CAA president. “She is an accomplished administrator, art historian, and teacher, as well as a respected and innovative museum educator. We are delighted to have Linda join us. We have great confidence that she will build on the dramatic growth CAA experienced during Susan Ball’s twenty-year tenure.”