Melissa Chiu will depart her post as director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., to lead the Guggenheim Museum in New York, making her the latest person to depart a Smithsonian-run museum as the Trump administration continues its crackdown.
She will report to Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation director and CEO Mariët Westermann, who facilitates all the museums worldwide in the Guggenheim network, among them a long-awaited Abu Dhabi institution that is reportedly nearing its inauguration. Chiu begins as director of Guggenheim Museum on September 1.
Aaron Seeto, the current Hirshhorn deputy director, will serve as an interim replacement for Chiu, who has led the museum since 2014, when she became the first person born outside the US ever to hold the post.
“Melissa has guided the Hirshhorn with thoughtfulness and purpose, strengthening its role as a national museum while supporting artists, scholars and the public,” Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said in a statement. “We are grateful for her leadership and wish her continued success in this next chapter.”
In the 12 years since, Chiu has cultivated a reputation for staging blockbuster exhibitions for art stars, such as one for Yayoi Kusama, whose 2017 “Infinity Mirror Rooms” exhibition drew a whopping 160,000 visitors. In recent years, the museum has also held shows for Laurie Anderson, Osgemeos, Adam Pendleton, Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, and others who are already well-known, both within and beyond the art industry.
Prior to joining the Hirshhorn, Chiu, who was born in Australia, had founded the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and served as a curator of contemporary Asian and Asian American art for the Asia Society in New York.
Some have been critical of Chiu’s crowd-pleasing tendencies. Her 2023 launch of The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, a Hirshhorn-facilitated reality show that saw artists jockey for an exhibition at the museum, was largely panned, with Anni Irish arguing in an ARTnews op-ed that the series “does little to decode the inner mechanisms of the art world for a general public.” (It was noticeably not mentioned in the Guggenheim’s press release about Chiu’s appointment this morning.)
The 2017 Kusama show was also ridiculed in some corners. In his Washington Post review of the show, critic Philip Kennicott accused the show of “rather bloodless rhetoric,” arguing that it prettified Kusama’s struggles with mental illness and made them palatable to the public.
In a statement, Westermann touted Chiu’s abilities to lure in a wider audience. “Melissa has an outstanding and inspiring track record of leadership in the arts, most recently as Director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,” she said. “She transformed the Hirshhorn with the international and local disposition that is so special to our institution, and I look forward to working in close partnership with her.”
Prior to Westermann, Richard Armstrong led both the foundation and the New York museum, leaving in 2023 after 15 years of directing the Guggenheim.
Chiu’s appointment solidifies the splitting of Armstrong’s role in two, though Westermann had temporarily led the New York museum in the period since her hiring. She told the New York Times on Thursday that she would now focus more of her time on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, with Chiu spearheading operations in New York.
Chiu is the latest person to exit the Smithsonian, a museum network that Trump alleged had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” in an executive order issued last year. He proceeded to claim he fired National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet—she resigned soon afterward, and now leads the Milwaukee Art Museum—and issue a list of artworks and presentations at Smithsonian museums that he found objectionable. Many dealt with marginalized communities, emphasizing issues related to race, trans identity, queer rights, and immigration.
Speaking to the New York Times, Chiu did not directly address the Trump administration’s attempts to censor the Smithsonian’s displays, but she did say that she would’ve accepted the Guggenheim’s offer, regardless of when it arrived. She called the role her “dream job.”
“Under any circumstances I would have taken this job, and I feel confident in the legacy that I’m leaving behind at the Hirshhorn,” she told the Times.
The Times also noted that Daniel Sallick, the longtime Hirshhorn board chair and a contributor to ARTnews, had departed his role at the end of his term in 2024. He is now on the Guggenheim’s board.
