The Smithsonian on Tuesday named Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, currently the executive director and CEO of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, as the next Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). She begins September 8.
Hartigan succeeds Jane Carpenter-Rock, who has led SAAM on an interim basis since September 2024, when Stephanie Stebich was removed as director and reassigned to an advisory role at the Smithsonian Institution. Stebich’s exit followed staff complaints about her management style and what the Washington Post reported were years of declining morale. Carpenter-Rock will remain at the museum as deputy director for museum content and outreach.
The appointment is a homecoming for Hartigan, who began her career at SAAM and spent two decades at the institution, eventually rising to chief curator. During that tenure she led an internationally recognized acquisitions initiative that significantly expanded the museum’s holdings of work by modern, contemporary, and self-taught artists. She also worked extensively on folk art and art by Black artists and developed an expertise on Joseph Cornell. In 2006, she organized a survey dedicated to Cornell that appeared at the Peabody Essex Museum, SAAM, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hartigan became the Peabody Essex’s first female director when she was appointed in 2021; she joined the museum in 2003 as chief curator since 2003 and was promoted to deputy director in 2016.
In a statement, Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, framed her deep experience with insitution as a reason why she was the right person to lead SAAM into the future. “Lynda is a visionary leader whose career reflects a deep commitment to American art, thoughtful scholarship and public engagement,” Bunch said.
Hartigan, in her own statement, said she was “honored to help shape the museum’s next chapters” and described SAAM and its Renwick Gallery as “a place where art encourages meaningful dialogue and connection for audiences from the local to the international.”
Hartigan takes over one of the most significant collections of American art in the country, including the nation’s largest holdings of New Deal art, a deep bench of American Impressionist and Gilded Age works, and contemporary craft at the Renwick. The museum reopened its contemporary galleries in 2023 after a two-year closure and a refresh by architect Annabelle Selldorf, with a hang that notably expanded the visibility of Latinx, queer, and Native American artists—a direction that ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger credited, in a review at the time, for shifting the museum’s picture of recent American art.
That shift in focus made SAAM one of the primary targets of President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, in which he said his administration would work to root out any “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from its various museums. The executive order specifically named SAAM’s then-current show, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” as supposed evidence.
In December, capping a year of turmoil and political pressure on the Smithsonian, the administration threatened to withhold federal funding, which accounts for roughly 62 percent of the Institution’s budget, unless it complied with outstanding document requests tied to a content review. (Bunch had previously promised to submit to that review while also maintaining the network’s independence from the government. But the administration alleged that the Smithsonian didn’t move quickly enough to turn over documents for the review.)
