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Exhibiting Leadership
A brush with modern art as a teenager leads Richard Armstrong '71 to a career as a curator all the way to the top spot at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

By Elaine Vitone

Richard Armstrong ’71 became the new director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on November 5 after 12 years at the helm of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. (Photo by Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York Times/Redux)

On an overcast morning in late October, Richard Armstrong '71 sits at a round table in his office at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art, an airy room overlooking a steep, autumn-painted gulley of trees. After 12 years as the museum's director and four as curator of contemporary art, he's now busily tying up loose ends, his lean, 6'5" frame bent over a buffet of paper piles. In two weeks, he'll begin his new position as the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
 
Looking up from his stacks of work, he reflects on how he came to be here, on the threshold of leading one of the world's most renowned collections of modern art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His face is calm, his blue eyes focused on the horizon outside. 
      
"When I started at Lake Forest, I thought I was going to be a politician," he says.
      
A native of Kansas City, Armstrong spent the last three summers of his high school years working in Washington, D.C. as a Senate page. On those hot, un-air-conditioned nights, he cooled off in museums. 
      
"I saw a painting by Arthur Dove at the Phillips Collection, and it really said something to me," he says of an abstract work called Flour Mill II. "From that I decided I was interested in pictures. It was a chance encounter, or predestined. I'm not sure which."
      
In the fall of 1967, Armstrong came to Lake Forest and enrolled in an introductory art history course with Franz Schulze, professor of art, emeritus. "Franz was engaging, well informed, an interesting speaker, and a good writer," says Armstrong. "[Art] became sort of a quest for me after that."
      
In 1968 he traveled to Paris and spent a year studying at Université de Dijon, Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne, and Ecole du Louvre. When he returned to Lake Forest, he resumed his coursework and became active in the Stentor, the student newspaper.
      
Armstrong is modest about his college years, citing lackluster performance in his core requirements, but he excelled in courses related to his art history major and earned special honors on his thesis, which he completed under Schulze's guidance.
      
"Richard was interested in what he learned in class," Schulze says, "but he was not a disciple. He marched to his own rhythm."
      
After graduation, Armstrong returned to Kansas City and worked as a journalist for a year before enrolling in a directed-study fellowship program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He then worked for five years as an associate curator for La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1980, the Whitney welcomed him back as a curator and a senior instructor in its independent study program. He remained there for 12 years before joining the Carnegie, first as a curator of contemporary art, then as chief curator, and finally as director, a role he's held since 1996.
 
When the Guggenheim announced Armstrong's appointment this fall, the news surprised the international art community. He seemed a far cry from his successor, Thomas Krens, who'd recently announced his resignation. In his 20-year tenure, Krens was known for his ambition to transform the Guggenheim into an international brand, launching satellite museums in Bilbao, Venice, and Berlin. He also spearheaded the Guggenheim Foundation's most ambitious venture to date, a 450,000-square-foot museum in Abu Dhabi slated to open in 2013.
      
Jennifer Blei Stockman, Guggenheim board president, says that though people weren't expecting the news, they warmed to it quickly. One notable art critic, whom Stockman reports has "never said a nice word about the Guggenheim," even gave her a high five.
 
"Richard is admired across the board," Stockman says, adding that Armstrong's colleagues credit him with a cool head, keen knowledge, intuitive sense of art, and reassuring nature. He's known as someone who talks to everyone, from artists to curators to donors to museum volunteers.
 
In a time when cultural enterprise is feeling the pinch, and the Guggenheim is embarking on a period of unprecedented growth and expansion, Armstrong seems just what the museum needs: a leader with a knack for inspiring loyalty and commitment.
 
Armstrong says his bottom-up approach to team building wasn't chosen consciously, but it has proven effective, and he plans to continue it at the Guggenheim. 
 
"One of the skills you need is to be a switchboard operator," he says. "You find out what a person is interested in and help him or her find somebody else who's interested in the same thing. Then everybody gets heated up."
 
Armstrong's gaze returns to a stack of papers on the table in front of him — more than 200 printed letters to friends of the museum. One by one, he flips through them, signing the ones that are ready to go and setting aside those that need updating — probably every third or fourth letter. For these, he pens in a
complete, updated street address from memory.
 
He shrugs this off as nothing, but in a way, his skill as a human Rolodex speaks to the reason the Guggenheim chose him — and perhaps also the reason he considered politics as a young man, before fate intervened. He's the kind of leader people can't help but get behind, the kind who makes them feel at once valued as individuals and included in something larger. 

Elaine Vitone is an award-winning freelance writer and book critic based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.