Executive director of Beach art museum decides to move on

VIRGINIA BEACH
 
The executive director of the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia is leaving to run a larger museum in Memphis, Tenn.
 
Cameron Kitchin, after six years at the Oceanfront-area fine-arts center, will direct the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. His last day is Oct. 31.
 
"We're disappointed," said Randy Sutton, chair of the board of trustees at the Beach center. "We wish him the best. He's going to a great museum."
 
The Memphis Brooks Museum has a wide-ranging permanent collection of about 8,500 works, from Auguste Renoir to Frank Stella. It stages special exhibitions and has a strong educational outreach program. The museum has more than 60 full-time employees, a $5.2 million budget and 36,600 square feet of gallery space.
 
The Contemporary Art Center has a modest permanent collection, focusing instead on temporary shows of recent art. The center has about 20 full-time staff members, a $1.7 million budget and just less than 10,000 square feet of display area.
 
"It's been a great six years," said Kitchin, speaking Wednesday from Memphis.
 
The decision to leave was tough to make, he said, but he couldn't pass up the opportunity.
 
Kitchin, 39, is a Norfolk native. The center provided his first museum-director job. Before that, he worked as a museum consultant and for the American Association of Museums.
 
Under Kitchin's leadership, the center merged its exhibitions and education departments.
 
"That really came from hands-on experience at the museum and seeing a lack of unity between exhibitions and educational programming and the lost opportunities," he said.
 
He knows of no other arts center that has done that, and other museums are watching to see how his experiment works out, he said.
 
Some of the center's most adventurous exhibitions resulted from the merger, such as "Transformed," a show of art using everyday items as toothpicks and drywall.
 
During his tenure, the center was enlarged and improved, and exhibitions became more ambitious. The center hosted the Magna Carta exhibition last year and a wide range of art shows, from surf and skate culture imagery to abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell's art. The center will be a major participant in Art of Glass 2, a festival of glass art set for the spring.
 
"He has definitely helped us move more strongly into a national posture," said Bill Campbell, board chairman from 2006 through June of this year. "And we did it with a balanced budget."
 
Valerie Neff has been appointed interim director starting Nov. 1. She is a past board chairwoman and was acting director before Kitchin's arrival in 2002.
 
A search committee has been formed to seek his replacement, said Sutton, who will chair that committee.
 
Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com