SANTA FE—The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has named Robert A. Kret its new director; he will succeed George King, who left July 31. Kret comes to the O’Keeffe from the Hunter Museum of American Artin Chattanooga, Tenn., where he served as director for nine years.Under his leadership, the museum saw profits and attendance double.Prior to taking the reins at the Hunter, Kret held posts at the Miami University Art Museum in Ohio, the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, and the Ella Sharp Museum in Michigan.

BOSTON—João Ribas has been appointed curator of exhibitions for the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, replacing Bill Arning, who will now head up Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum. Ribas, a former ARTINFO editor and currently curator at the Drawing Center in New York, will assume his post on September 21.  

Farewells
NASHUA, N.H.—Abstract artist Hyman Bloom died on August 26 at the age of 96. Born in Latvia in 1913, Bloom moved in 1920 to the United States, where he went on to study art at Harvard University and at the school of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. He spent much of his life in the Boston area, where as an adult he joined the Public Works of Art Project and the Massachusetts Works Progress Administration and taught for a short time at both Harvard and Wellesley College. His artwork remains in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts'. Beyond being awarded a number of arts fellowships, Bloom also earned high compliments from his peers for his work: Artists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were both said to admire Bloom and to credit him with being the “first Abstract Expressionist in America.” An exhibition of Bloom’s work will open at New York’s Yeshiva University Museum on Sept. 13 and run through Jan. 24, 2010; the show was planned before the artist's death.