After holding the post for just 9 months, Jeffrey Weiss has resigned as director of the Dia Art Foundation.
Weiss is open about the reasons for his decision; it seems the bureaucratic demands of directing a foundation like Dia had taken Weiss too far away from his scholarly and curatorial work. Weiss was formerly the curator and head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. for 13 years. The 49 year old has published on the artists including Picasso, Duchamp and Rothko and it is likely that Weiss will return to this field.
Dia’s ambition is to establish a permanent exhibition space in New York to develop a program and it was expected that Weiss would help realize this. The news marks another disappointment for this pioneering institution. It was only two years ago that Dia lost its biggest benefactor, Leonard Riggio, at the same time as Michael Govan, who left to become director of the Los Angeles County Museum.
Nathalie de Gunzburg, the chairwoman of Dia’s board, said that the search for a replacement director would not be hurried.