| James S. Snyder | |
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James S. Snyder |
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| Born | 1952 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
James S. Snyder (born in 1952 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is the director of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.
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James S. Snyder is a graduate of Harvard University and a Loeb Fellow of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is married to Tina Davis Snyder, a graphic designer, and they have two children.
From 1986-1996, Snyder served as deputy director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During his tenure, he oversaw the museum’s $60-million, 350,000-square-foot expansion, which was completed in 1984. He also had significant organizational responsibility for such major international loan exhibitions as Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (1992) and Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective (1980).
Snyder has been the Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Israel Museum since 1996. On his first visit to the Israel Museum, he was stunned at the power of the museum’s site.[1]
During his tenure, the Museum has strengthened its international presence with a series of important loan exhibitions in Jerusalem and traveling exhibitions worldwide; continued to expand its holdings across all of its collecting areas; developed its network of International Friends organizations, now operating in fourteen countries worldwide; launched a campaign to double its endowment to $150 million; and undergone a series of upgrades and enhancements.
In 2011, Snyder oversaw the completion of a comprehensive $100-million project to unify and enhance the facilities throughout the campus, the most comprehensive capital undertaking since the founding of the museum in 1965. During his tenure, Snyder has been responsible for the overall direction of the Museum’s curatorial program, has organized major international loan exhibitions and traveled to numerous exhibitions abroad.
Under Snyder's direction, the museum has made important acquisitions, among them the Beth Shean Venus (3rd Century CE); the First Nuremberg Haggadah, Germany (ca. 1449); Nicolas Poussin’s Destruction and Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem (1625); Rembrandt van Rijn’s St. Peter in Prison (1631); Jackson Pollock’s Horizontal Composition (1949); the Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art; and Olafur Eliasson’s Your Activity Horizon (2004). A major collection of European and American photography assembled by long-time museum patrons Noel and Harriette Levine of New York was donated to the museum.
In 2006, Snyder was awarded the Commendatore dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana (Commander of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity) of the Republic of Italy. In 2010, he received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) of the French Republic.
Snyder co-authored Museum Design: Planning and Building for Art (Oxford University Press) in 1993.
| Cultural offices | ||
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| Preceded by Martin Weyl |
Director of the Israel Museum 1996–present |
Incumbent |