By Press Release Submitted to OnMilwaukee.com Published Oct 14, 2016 at 3:56 PM

The Milwaukee Art Museum announced today that its chief curator, Brady Roberts, is leaving to become the executive director/CEO of the Vero Beach Museum of Art in Vero Beach, Florida. Roberts came to the Museum in 2009. During his seven-year tenure, Roberts elevated the institution’s contemporary art program and oversaw the 2015 reinstallation of the museum’s collections.

As chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Roberts organized several notable exhibition projects. In 2012, Roberts mounted an exhibition of the site-specific installations of New York-based artist Tara Donovan, an artist emerging as one of the most talented of her generation.

In that same year, Roberts secured a major video work by the pioneering London-based artist Isaac Julien. Julien’s "Expeditions" trilogy – "True North" (2004), "Fantôme Afrique" (2005) and "Western Union: Small Boats" (2007) – was, for the first time, presented in its entirety, sequentially, at the museum. In 2014, together with the Centre Pompidou, Roberts co-organized a major Wassily Kandinsky retrospective.

The international partnership with the Paris museum, one of the major repositories of work by Kandinsky, allowed for a rich and comprehensive look at the career of one of the most important and revolutionary artists of the twentieth century.

Roberts played a key role in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s 2015 major reinstallation project, which culminated in a sweeping renovation of its two original buildings. In addition to leading the first major reinstallation of the museum’s Collection Galleries, Roberts played a key role in the successful $34 million capital campaign for this project. He also successfully guided key acquisitions by Tara Donovan, Thomas Struth, Yinka Shonabare and David Schnell, among others.

"The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to Mr. Roberts for his significant contributions to the museum’s curatorial program, ones that lay the foundation for the visionary work of the years ahead," said Marcelle Polednik, PhD, Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director. "We wish him great success in his directorial debut at the Vero Beach Museum of Art."

Roberts’ last day at the museum is Oct. 21.