The Montclair Art Museum has a new chief curator. The New Jersey institution hired Kate Kraczon, who lost her job as director of exhibitions and chief curator at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, late last year amid a wave of layoffs; she had served in that office since 2019.
Kraczon takes over the role from Gail Stavitsky, who had held the post since 1994, and takes up her new position June 15. Before the Bell, Kraczon was associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 2008–19.
The museum also appointed Todd Caissie, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation and previously director of Canada’s New Brunswick Internment Camp Museum, as director. Before entering museum work, he was an executive search consultant in Tokyo and New York.
“I am honored to join MAM at this pivotal moment, and to work in close partnership with Todd Caissie, whose vision for the museum resonates with my own,” said Kraczon in an email. “I bring a contemporary, artist-focused, and deeply collaborative curatorial practice to what is already an impressively audience-responsive and beloved public museum.
“Inspired by MAM’s dynamic integration of public engagement and education with the exhibition program, I look forward to contributing a curatorial approach that is both rigorous and welcoming—one that expands the possibilities of what a museum can be,” she added. “The continued commitment of the Board of Trustees to Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion and to Indigenous artists and communities has been profoundly meaningful to me at this moment.”
Kraczon notched a number of accomplishments at the Bell. She commissioned and programmed the only US exhibition of “Prisoners of Love,” by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. She brought to Providence a version of the multimedium work that French Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet presented at the French Pavilion in the 2024 Venice Biennale. The museum presented a newly commissioned film installation by American filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin that received France’s 2023 César Award for best documentary short, and she organized a major survey of Bay Area painter Franklin Williams as well as exhibitions with Jules Gimbrone, Savannah Knoop, and Faith Wilding.
During her tenure, the Bell established collaborations with major partnerships with Performa, the New York–based performance art biennial; influential British venue Nottingham Contemporary; Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA) Barcelona, one of Spain’s most important museums; and Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam (formerly Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), another high-profile institution. She raised significant funds to increase the Bell’s budget from $180,000 in fiscal year 2022 to nearly $600,000 in 2025, while establishing a $1.2 million endowment for public art. The Bell won support from the Teiger Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Terra Foundation of American Art, among major funders.
Founded in 1914, the Montclair Art Museum was one of the first in the States to primarily engage in collecting American art and to build a significant collection by Native artists. Its grounds were developed into an arboretum in the 1940s, and it has expanded three times over its life, more than doubling its size from 20,000 to 42,000 square feet in 2001. Its collection spans over 12,000 works, by artists including John Singleton Copley, Jeffrey Gibson, Marsden Hartley, Edgar Heap of Birds, Winslow Homer, Barbara Kruger, Wendy Red Star, John Singer Sargent, Fritz Scholder, and Kara Walker.
