Montclair Art Museum Names Kate Kraczon Chief Curator as Leadership Team Expands
Montclair Art Museum has appointed Kate Kraczon as its new chief curator, bringing in a curator with a strong record in contemporary art and institutional partnerships. She will begin on June 15, succeeding Gail Stavitsky, who has held the post since 1994. The museum also named Todd Caissie as director.
Kraczon joins the New Jersey institution after serving as director of exhibitions and chief curator at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island, from 2019 until late last year, when she lost her job amid a wave of layoffs. Before that, she spent 2008 to 2019 as associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
At the Bell, Kraczon built a program that leaned toward ambitious, artist-centered exhibitions and cross-institutional collaboration. She commissioned and programmed the only U.S. presentation of “Prisoners of Love” by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. She also brought to Providence a version of the multimedia work French Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet presented at the French Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Other projects included a newly commissioned film installation by American filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin, which received France’s 2023 César Award for best documentary short, as well as surveys and exhibitions with Franklin Williams, Jules Gimbrone, Savannah Knoop, and Faith Wilding.
Her tenure also coincided with a sharp increase in the Bell’s resources. The gallery’s budget rose from $180,000 in fiscal year 2022 to nearly $600,000 in 2025, and she helped establish a $1.2 million endowment for public art. The Bell also drew support from the Teiger Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Terra Foundation of American Art, while building partnerships with Performa, Nottingham Contemporary, Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA) Barcelona, and Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam.
For Montclair, the appointment signals continuity with a museum that has long balanced American art, Native artists, and public engagement. Founded in 1914, the institution was among the first in the United States to focus primarily on collecting American art and to build a significant collection by Native artists. Its grounds became an arboretum in the 1940s, and the museum has expanded three times, more than doubling in size to 42,000 square feet in 2001.
Today, the collection includes more than 12,000 works by artists such as John Singleton Copley, Jeffrey Gibson, Marsden Hartley, Edgar Heap of Birds, Winslow Homer, Barbara Kruger, Wendy Red Star, John Singer Sargent, Fritz Scholder, and Kara Walker. With Kraczon and Caissie now in place, the museum appears to be entering a new phase shaped by contemporary programming and a broader institutional vision.
