ST. LOUIS, July 23, 2024—The Saint Louis Art Museum announced today the appointment of Jorge Rivas as the museum’s inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer Deputy Director and Chief Curator. This newly created position, made possible by the generous commitment of museum trustee and former SLAM curator Emily Rauh Pulitzer, will oversee the museum’s curatorial, collection and exhibition departments. Rivas comes to SLAM from the Denver Art Museum, where he has served since 2016 as the Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Latin American Art and Head of the Mayer Center. He will begin his new role in St. Louis in October 2024.
“We are excited to welcome Jorge Rivas to our team,” said Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “His extensive and diverse range of experiences, along with his innovative approach to curatorial practice, will be invaluable as we continue to inspire and engage our diverse audiences through our collections and exhibitions.”
In his new role, Rivas will oversee SLAM’s eight curatorial departments, as well as the art preparation and installation, conservation, registration and exhibitions departments. As one of his first priorities, he will also develop and lead the implementation of a master plan for the museum’s collection, aimed at identifying new areas for collecting and presenting art—and ensuring the museum is appropriately focused on engaging a new generation of visitors.
“I am deeply honored to join the Saint Louis Art Museum and to build upon the extraordinary legacy of Emily Rauh Pulitzer and the many other museum professionals who have made the museum a leader in the field,” Rivas said.
Rivas brings to SLAM a variety of leadership and curatorial experiences in art museums and a major international private collection, as well as a background as an architect and industrial designer. As the Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Latin American Art and Head of the Mayer Center at the Denver Art Museum, he directed the largest and most comprehensive collection of Spanish colonial art in the United States. This included securing, in 2017, a major gift of 33 works of colonial art from the Caribbean and South America, which filled an important gap in the Spanish colonial collection. In 2021, as part of the museum’s overarching campus expansion, Rivas oversaw the renovation of DAM’s 11,000-square-foot Latin American art galleries, which increased their curatorial and educational flexibility.
Under Rivas’s leadership, the Mayer Center expanded its reach to include modern and contemporary art from Latin America, which significantly enriched the museum’s offerings. He also supported the museum’s fundraising initiatives, bringing in a $2 million contribution toward the creation of new galleries for modern and contemporary Latin American art, and securing local donor support for a full-time curator position with focus on modern and contemporary Latin American art.
At DAM, Rivas curated or co-curated a number of exhibitions, including “Have a Seat: Mexican Chair Design Today” (2024), “The Skeletal World of José Guadalupe Posada” (2023) and “ReVisión: Art in the Americas” (2021). He is coeditor of the forthcoming book “Neocolonial: Inventing Modern Latin American Nations,” being published by DAM.
Before joining the Denver Art Museum, Rivas served as an independent curator in New York and as an associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. From 1999 to 2013, he was the curator of Spanish colonial art for the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, working between New York and Caracas, Venezuela. In that role, in addition to addressing strategic collecting priorities, Rivas developed an international exhibition and long-term loans program to promote knowledge of Venezuelan colonial art in the United States. This included developing partnerships with institutions such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2006), LACMA (2007), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2010) and the Brooklyn Museum (2013)—all of which led to new exhibitions or programs.
Rivas holds a doctorate and master’s degree in decorative arts, design history and material culture from The Bard Graduate Center in New York. He also holds a master’s degree in industrial design from Università degli Studi di Firenze, in Italy, and an architecture degree from Universidad Central de Venezuela.
The Saint Louis Art Museum retained executive search firm Isaacson, Miller to assist with this important inaugural position.
CONTACT: Molly Morris, molly.morris@slam.org, 314.655.5250
Jorge Rivas (Photo courtesy of Eric Stephenson)