BERLIN—Thomas Eller will be the first director of the new Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin gallery, Artnet reports. Eller has long been the editor of Artnet's German magazine and recently became the director of Artnet's Berlin office. He is also an artist known for his three-dimensional photo installations and won the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2006 from Cologne's Käthe Kollwitz Museum. Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin opens on October 29 with a show by Berlin-based video artist Candice Breitz.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Mary L. Levkoff will be the new curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art. Levkoff is currently curator of European sculpture and classical antiquities at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she began working in 1989 as an assistant curator. She is the organizing curator and primary author for "Hearst the Collector," an international loan exhibition running November 9 – February 1, 2009 at LACMA. At the National Gallery, she replaces Nicholas Penny, who left in February to direct the National Gallery in London.

AMSTERDAM—Bart Rutten has been named the next curator of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam's visual arts collection, Artforum reports. Rutten, a specialist in video art, worked previously at the Stedelijk Museum 's-Hertogenbosch and the Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/Time Based Arts, Amsterdam. He is a guest lecturer at a number of educational institutions, including Amsterdam's Sandberg Institute, Eindhoven's Design Academy, and the University of Utrecht. He begins at the Stedelijk Amsterdam in December.

SEOUL—Arts Council Korea has chosen Eungie Joo as the commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at next year's Venice Biennale, Artforum reports. Joo is the first non-Korean national appointed to the position. The director and curator of public programs at New York's New Museum since 2007, Joo created the institution's Museum as Hub global partnership, a curatorial-education hybrid project with five international partners. Before working at the New Museum, Joo was the founding director and curator of REDCAT gallery in Los Angeles for four years.

BELLEVUE, Wash.—The Bellevue Arts Museum has announced that Mark Crawford will serve as interim executive director, beginning on October 20, the Seattle Times reports. Crawford served most recently as CEO of the Talaris Foundation, which supports parents and caregivers. He succeeds former executive director Michael Monroe, who stepped down last month to become director of curatorial affairs at the museum.

OKLAHOMA CITY—The Oklahoma City Museum of Art has named Glen Gentele its new president and CEO, the Oklahoma City Business News reports. Gentele is currently the director of the open-air Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis and a professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He assumes the position in Oklahoma City on January 1, 2009.

OSLO—The Fotogalleriet foundation has appointed Leif Magne Tangen director from 2009 through 2013, Artforum reports. Tangen is currently gallery director at Pierogi Liepzig and will assume the position at Fotogalleriet — the only Norwegian institution devoted to camera-based art — on January 1. He has worked as gallery manager at Fotogalleriet, as a critic, and as an editorial board member of Billedkunst, and in he 2006 established, with photographer Michael Moser, the nonprofit institution D21 Kunstraum Leipzig. At the Fotogalleriet, Tangen succeeds Ida Kierulf, who has accepted the newly created position of curator and project coordinator at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.—Mary Miller, the chair of Yale University's art history department, has been named Yale College's next dean, the first woman to hold the position. The Yale Daily News reports that Miller will take up the position, which was vacated by Peter Salovey when he became provost at the beginning of October, on December 1. Miller joined the Yale faculty in 1981, serving as the director of undergraduate studies, chair of the art history department, and chair of the Latin American studies department since then. She became the master of Saybrook College, one of the 12 residential colleges that make up Yale College, the undergraduate school of Yale University, in 1999. Miller is currently preparing for a series of lectures at the National Gallery of Art that she will deliver in spring 2010.

LOS ANGELES—Maria Arena Bell and Pierre Norman Rolin are the latest additions to the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the L.A. Times reports. Bell, a head writer for The Young and the Restless, is an active arts advocate. She has led the museum's acquisition and collection committee since 2004, and she chaired the museum's gala for its Takashi Murakami exhibition in 2007. Rolin is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Strategic Real Estate Advisors, as well as the founder of the StratREAL Foundation, which works to help youth around the world through education, healthcare, housing, and the arts. He is also an art collector and a strong supporter of MOCA.

ATHENS—The Athens Biennial has announced the curators for its second edition, which runs June 15 – Oct. 4, 2009. The art and performances in public spaces will be curated by Dimitris Papaioannou, former creative director of the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and Zafos Xagoraris. Exhibitions, installations, public interventions, screening programs, and symposia will be curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, Diana Baldon, Christopher Marinos, Chus Martínez, and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, the former artistic director of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. The overall exhibition will be designed by architect and artist Andreas Angelidakis.

Farewells
LOS ANGELES—William Claxton,celebrated music photographer and founding member of the RecordingAcademy, died on October 11 at the age of 80 due to complications from congestive heart failure, reports the Associated Press.Beginning his career in 1952 at the University of California, LosAngeles, Claxton went on to become renowned for his diverse portraitsof musical artists from Chet Baker to Bob Dylan. His photos gracedeverything from album covers to spreads in magazines such asLife, Paris Match, and Vogue. As husband to model Peggy Moffitt, healso dabbled in fashion photography in the 1960s, creating a collectionof iconic images that feature Rudi Gernreich’s designs and directing a  fashion film, Basic Black, currently housed in theMuseum of Modern Art, New York. Claxton was acknowledged for hisvariety of achievements with the Lucie Award for music photography atthe International Photography Awards in 2003.

PARIS—Senegalese artist Iba Ndiaye, 80, a highly influential painter of 20th century African modernism, died on October 5 in Paris, reports the New York Times. The cause was heart failure after a long illness. Ndiaye was born in Senegal, leaving in 1949 for a ten-year stint in Montpellier and Paris to study architecture, moving back in 1959, and a making a final move to Paris in 1967. After Senegal’s declaration of independence in the 1960s, he created a department of plastic arts at the National School of Fine Arts in Dakur and taught there until 1966. At the same time, he and a number of other artists founded a Senegalese art movement called École de Darkar. He was known for straying away from the movement's primitivist, non-colonialist bent with semi-abstract canvases that referenced the School of Paris style. He was featured in several international exhibitions, including “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994” and “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art.”