Assessing The Cleveland Museum’s New Director

He is not a household name, even within the art world, and so he might have seemed an underdog for a major directorship at one of America’s leading museums. But Steven Litt is impressed anyway. “In choosing Timothy Rub of Cincinnati as its next director, the Cleveland Museum of Art picked an arts manager who has not yet achieved cultural stardom… Rub transformed local perceptions about the 125-year-old [Cincinnati Art Museum,] long viewed as an elitist institution on a hilltop in Eden Park, overlooking the rest of the city… The new director will need those skills in Cleveland. Rub, whose appointment begins in April, will take over the massive, $258 million expansion and renovation the museum launched in October.”