Longtime museum director and curator Philippe Vergne is assuming a newly created position at Miami’s Bass Museum of Art, joining the institution on October 1 as artistic director and chief curator. Since 2019 he has led Portugal’s Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, in Porto.
“Philippe Vergne brings a remarkable depth of curatorial experience and a global perspective to The Bass at a pivotal moment in Miami Beach’s growth as a dynamic and complex city,” said Silvia Karman Cubiñá, who has been executive director and chief curator since 2008, in press materials. She will transition to being solely executive director.
“I am honored to join The Bass’ team,” said Vergne. “I am very impressed with the consistent and deliberate work that Silvia Cubiñá has done over the years to create an institution deeply committed to artists across cultures and disciplines and to the transformative potential of contemporary art and ideas.”
French-born Vergne has served in high museum positions ever since he earned two master’s degrees from Paris’s Sorbonne University in 1992. He served as director of the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille until 1997, then moved to Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, where he was deputy director and chief curator from 1997 to 2008, overseeing notable exhibitions of Kara Walker and Yves Klein as well as “How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age.” While there, he also co-curated the 2006 biennial exhibition, “Day For Night,” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art with Chrissie Iles. In the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman wrote that the show was “very much an insider’s affair, a hermetic take on what has been making waves,” one that “will seem old hat to aficionados and inscrutable to many others.”
That was followed by a move to New York, where he was director of the Dia Art Foundation from 2008 to 2014. In 2013, the museum moved to sell 27 works of art worth as much as $25.6 million for its collection at Sotheby’s in order to establish and acquisitions fund; Heiner Friedrich and Fariha de Menil Friedrich, who established Dia in 1974, sued to stop the sale, of works by artists including John Chamberlain, Barnett Newman, and Cy Twombly. Vergne defended the sale by saying that “Dia cannot be a mausoleum.” The suit was withdrawn, and the sale went forward, ultimately totaling $38.4 million.
In his last year there, the museum opened a major retrospective of the work of American sculptor Carl Andre, one of the founders of Minimalism, the first since the 1970s. The show “looks terrific,” wrote Holland Cotter in the Times, but the show was met with some protest by those who believe that he killed his third wife, artist Ana Mendieta, who fell to her death from a window of their New York apartment in 1985. Andre was charged with murder, tried, and acquitted.
Vergne then moved cross-country to serve as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles from 2014 to 2019, taking over from New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who left three years into a five-year contract. Vergne’s own tenure ended with controversy after he fired chief curator Helen Molesworth in March 2018. He revealed two months later that he would exit the institution the following year. The museum had already been in an unwelcome spotlight after artist Mark Grotjahn pulled out of being honored at the museum’s gala and artist Lari Pittman resigned from the board, saying he lacked confidence in the relationship between Vergne, the board, and the curatorial team.
The next year, Vergne took the corner office at the Serralves. João Ribas had resigned as artistic director several months before amid controversy surrounding a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition. While in Porto, Vergne oversaw a major expansion and curated exhibitions of artists including Ai Weiwei, Allora & Calzadilla, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Mark Bradford, Maurizio Cattelan, and Yoko Ono, as well as an upcoming Jenny Holzer exhibition.
Vergne’s hire comes amid the Bass’s planned expansion, led by Los Angeles–based architectural firm Johnston Marklee, set to be completed in 2027.
Founded in 1964 by the city of Miami Beach, the Bass began with the collection of John Bass, president of Puerto Rico’s Fajardo Sugar Company, and his wife Johanna, some 500 works spanning Old Master paintings, textiles, and sculptures. It opened in what was formerly the Miami Beach Public Library and Art Center, a 1930s Art Deco building. The Bass added an Arata Isozaki/David Gauld expansion in 2017. It focuses on exhibitions of contemporary art in varied media. It is supported by public funds and membership dues.
