New York’s Museum of Arts and Design appoints new director

The Museum of Arts and Design in New York has announced its new director: Glenn Adamson, an art expert who has openly criticized the museum in the past.

Adamson has worked for the last eight years at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, heading the museum’s research department. He will begin his new job on Oct. 15, succeeding Holly Hotchner, who stepped down at the end of April after more than 16 years.

Adamson publicly criticized the museum in a 2011 article published in Art in America magazine.

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The New York Times reported that he wrote that the museum’s new name -- it was previously known as the American Craft Museum -- “seemed to have been chosen mainly for its vagueness -- all the arts, and design too? Isn’t design one of the arts anyway? Obviously the real objective, beyond erasing the word ‘craft,’ was to eliminate all the baggage the term brought along with it.”

In a statement sent by the museum, Adamson said he worked as an intern at the museum after graduating from college. “I have closely followed MAD’s development and expansion in the years since,” he wrote.

A few years ago, the museum experienced a controversy surrounding its new home at 2 Columbus Circle. Museum leaders hired architect Brad Cloepfil to rework the facade of the famous building designed by Edward Durell Stone.

Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne weighed in on the preservation controversy in a 2008 review of the refurbished building.

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