BRUNSWICK — After nearly three years on the job, the director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is leaving Maine and heading back to the West Coast.

Kevin Salatino will leave the Brunswick college this summer to become the director of art collections at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. He begins his new job in July.
Salatino came to Bowdoin in the summer of 2009 from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, where he worked as head of the department of prints and drawings. Prior to that, he spent nine years as curator of graphic arts at the Getty Research Institute, also in California.

Salatino said he did not pursue the Huntington job. “I was not anticipating moving, I was not planning to move. They approached me. It was the furthest thing from my mind,” he said today. “I went through the process, and lo and behold, they offered me the job. It was an offer I felt I simply could not ignore.”

Salatino leaves Bowdoin with high praise from his boss. College president Barry Mills cited Salatino’s leadership for the museum’s successful string of exhibitions, including a major Edward Hopper exhibition last summer that drew nearly 50,000 visitors and garnered national media attention.
Salatino currently is working on an exhibition by photographer William Wegman, which will be on view this summer.

“We expect similar great things from the Wegman exhibition, which Kevin has agreed to launch before assuming his new position at the Huntington in July,” Mills said in an email to the Bowdoin community announcing Salatino’s departure.

“Beyond these signature events, Kevin has helped realize the potential of the major renovation and expansion of our museum in 2007 by closely integrating studies of the collections across the curriculum and mounting exhibitions of international renown.”

Salatino praised Bowdoin for its support of the museum and of the arts in general, and predicted the private liberal arts college will have a deep well of qualified candidates from which to choose a replacement.

“Because of the Hopper show, anyone who looks at us from the outside will say, ‘Wow, they were able to do a world-class exhibition that could compete with any exhibition at any museum anywhere. That sounds like a place I would like to be,’” he said. “We have some great momentum right now, and I do not think that momentum will be lost. There is always a little blip when one director leaves and another comes, but I do not think it will be a serious blip.”

Bowdoin will begin a national search for Salatino’s replacement in the coming months, Mills said.

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