New Director of the Honolulu Museum of Art

New Director Halona Norton-Westbrook will take over the helm of the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii starting in January.
She currently serves as curatorial affairs director and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Toledo Art Museum in Ohio, which she entered as a leadership fellow for Andrew W. Mellon in 2013.
In addition, Norton-Westbrook co-led a $2.25 million redesign and reinstallation for the main building of the TMA. (Diane C. Wright, senior curator of glass and decorative arts at the Toledo Museum, will act as interim director of curatorial affairs while Norton-Westbrook’s replacement is being searched.)
Norton-Westbrook said in a statement announcing her departure and new start, “The Toledo Museum of Art has been enormously influential in my museum career trajectory, offering priceless guidance and grounding in museum practices and an extraordinary array of professional opportunities.
As I move on to the Honolulu Board of directors, I look forward to leveraging these experiences and promoting engaging exhibition, education and outreach programs for a new set of audiences and communities.
The publications department of the Museum of Modern Art has added Curtis R. Scott as its new associate publisher. Scott joins the Princeton University Art Museum’s newly renovated museum, where he has worked in various leadership roles for seven years.
Scott previously held various editorial roles at universities and museums throughout the country, including the Clark Art Institute, Princeton University Press, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Architect Markus Dochantschi’s company studioMDA was selected to design the new 55,000-square-foot auction house at 432 Park Avenue in New York for the Phillips auction house. In spring 2020, the new space will be open for business.
Dochantschi had previously run the office for seven years before opening his own shop for Zaha Hadid Architects, which had designed spaces for various galleries, including Kasmin, Anton Kern, and the new Andrew Kreps space in Tribeca.
In a statement, Dochantschi said, “I think we will create a new kind of auction house with a more exciting relationship with the city, having worked on several cultural spaces, to show the ever-changing exhibitions of Phillips.”