NEW HAVEN, Conn.—The Yale University Art Gallery will add an Indo-Pacific art department and has hired Ruth Barnes to lead it, the New York Times reports. Barnes is currently textile curator in the department of Eastern art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. She will join Yale first as a consultant in April and then full time in 2010.

PARIS—The International Association of Art Critics has elected its new officers, Artnet reports. Yacouba Konaté, a philosopher at the University of Abidjan-Cocody in the Ivory Coast who was artistic director of the 2006 Dakar Biennale, will be president; Haydee Venegas, an art historian at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico, will be secretary; and Marie Luise Syring, a freelance art critic and the former cultural development director of the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, will be acting general secretary.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.—Jay A. Clarke has been named curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Clark Institute of Art, the museum announced today. She joins the Clark from the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is currently associate curator of prints and drawings. At the AIC, she organized a host of exhibitions, including "Becoming Edvard Munch," which is on view through April 26 and has received extensive critical acclaim. She has also taught a number of courses and seminars at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Brown University.

CHICAGO—The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, best known for its annual Fellows Program, or "genius grants," has hired Robert Gallucci as its next president, the Washington Post reports. Gallucci has been the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University for 13 years, before which he spent more than two decades in the foreign service. He served as the assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs in 1992–93, was the U.S.'s chief negotiator during a 1994 nuclear crisis with North Korea, and was a special advisor for the implementation the Dayton Accords. He leaves his post at Georgetown on June 30 and starts at the MacArthur Foundation, for a five-year term, the next day.

NEW YORK—The Public Art Fund has announced the resignation of its director, Rochelle Steiner, effective April 15, 2009. Steiner began her position in February 2006 and during her time with the organization was instrumental in the organization of Olafur Eliasson's New York City Waterfalls, which drew an audience of 1.4 million and generated over $69 million for the city of New York, as well as the presentation of the work of 35 artists in four out of five of New York's boroughs. Projects organized by Steiner that are currently on view include Christian Jankowski's Living Sculptures at Doris C. Freedman Plaza and "Trapdoor," a group exhibition at Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn. She is a 2009 fellow at New York's Center for Curatorial Leadership and has lectured and taught internationally. Before working for Public Art Fund, she was chief curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London from 2001 through 2006.

Farewells
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif.—Billiionaire philanthropist Leonore Annenberg died on March 12 at the age of 91, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Annenberg was the wife of Walter H. Annenberg, a publishing magnate who earned $3 billion when he sold his Triangle Publications, Inc. to Rupert Murdoch in 1988. Walter and Leonore were extremely generous arts philanthropists, giving $10 million to the campaign to keep Thomas Eakin's The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia, $30 million for the relocation of the Barnes Foundation, countless grants to the University of Pennsylvania, and roughly $290 million over time to the University of Southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 1989, Walter founded the Annenberg Foundation, which has given $4.2 billion to cultural, educational, and medical institutions since its conception. When Walter died in 2002, Leonore assumed control of the foundation. She also served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Britain from 1969 to 1974 and President Reagan's chief of protocol in 1981. The Annenberg Foundation announced a $1.3 million grant to the Louvre this week to fund education initiatives at the museum.

ST. LOUIS—Painter and sculptor Ernest Trova died on March 8 at the age of 82, the Associated Press reports. The cause was congestive heart failure. Trova was a self-taught artist, best known for his "Falling Man" series, which features an armless human figure that represents the imperfection of man. He co-founded the Laumeier Sculpture Park with a gift of 40 large-scale artworks to St. Louis County. In 1963, a solo show of his work inaugurated the Pace Gallery in New York, where he continued to exhibit for more than 20 years. Trova's artworks are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate, among others.

NEW YORK—Schuyler Chapin, an active member of the New York arts community, died on March 7 at the age of 86, reports the New York Times. Chapin, who had suffered from ill health since a heart attack in 2005, held many prominent positions throughout his career. Despite never attending college or graduating from high school, he served as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts, and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's cultural affairs commissioner. He started off in 1953 at Columbia Artists Management and in 1959 went to Columbia Records. From 1964 to 1969, he was vice president of programming at Lincoln Center and helped create the "Mostly Mozart" series there. He became the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in 1972, where his experiences provided material for two of his three books. He went on to become the Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts, a position that he held for 10 years. From 1994 to 2001, he served as the cultural affairs commissioner for New York City.