James S. Snyder

James S. Snyder
Born	1952 (age 63–64) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University
Occupation	Director and historian

James S. Snyder (born 1952) is a museum director and art historian.

Museum career

Snyder has been the Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Israel Museum since 1997.

During his tenure, the Museum has strengthened its regional and international presence with a series of important loan exhibitions in Jerusalem and traveling exhibitions worldwide; expanded its encyclopedic holdings across all of its collecting areas; developed its network of International Friends organizations, now operating in sixteen countries worldwide; increased annual Museum attendance to nearly one million visitors, from 350,000 in 2005; and grown the Museum’s endowment more than fivefold to $200 million.

Snyder has also spearheaded a series of architectural upgrades and enhancements to the Museum, culminating in 2010 with a comprehensive $100-million renewal project by James Carpenter Design Associates and Efrat-Kowalsky Architects, designed to resonate with the Museum’s original architectural plan and to unify the visitor experience throughout the Museum’s 20-acre campus.^[1]

Throughout his tenure, Snyder has been responsible for the overall direction of the Museum’s curatorial program, and has organized major exhibitions at the Museum and traveled numerous exhibitions abroad. Highlights include: A Brief History of Humankind (2015); Twilight over Berlin: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie, 1905-1945; James Turrell: Light Spaces (2014); Dress Codes: Revealing the Jewish Wardrobe (2014); Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey (2013); A World Apart: Glimpses into the Lives of Hasidic Jews (2012); William Kentridge: Five Themes (2011); Looking for Owners and Orphaned Art (2008), two ground-breaking exhibitions on art looted during World War II; and Surrealism and Beyond (2007), which completed major international tours in 2009 and then again in 2014-15.^[2]

Under Snyder's direction, the museum has made important acquisitions, among them an illuminated Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, acquired jointly with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (ca. 1457);^[3] 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); Gustav Klimt’s Die Medizin (Kompositionsentwurf) (1897-1898);^[4] Jackson Pollock’s Horizontal Composition (1949); the Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art; Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (1997); Olafur Eliasson’s Your Activity Horizon (2004) and whenever the rainbow appears (2010); and Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). In 2015, the Museum was gifted over 350 works of ancient glass and Greco-Roman art and archaeology from the Robert and Renée Belfer Collection;^[5] 25 Baroque and Rococo French paintings from the Alexis Gregory Collection; and 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 2010.

From 1986 to 1996, Snyder served as deputy director of The Museum of Modern Art, 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 Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective (1980) and Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (1992).

Snyder is a graduate of Harvard University, a Loeb Fellow of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and holds an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hebrew Union College.^[6] He is married to Tina Davis Snyder, a graphic designer, and they have two children: a daughter, Lily Snyder, Private Client Group, Sotheby's, New York; and a son, Daniel D. Snyder, of Boredom Therapy, New York^[7] .

Honors and Awards

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. In 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Foundation’s Teddy Kollek Award for Significant Contribution to Jerusalem^[8] and, in 2012, he was made an Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem, an honor first awarded to Israel's first President Chaim Weizmann.^[9]

Published Works

Snyder co-authored Museum Design: Planning and Building for Art (Oxford University Press) in 1993; and he authored the book Renewed: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Israel Museum, Jerusalem) in 2011 and 2015 (revised).

References

External links

• ARTINFO Pushing the Past Forward: A Conversation with Israel Museum Director James Snyder. Accessed October 1, 2011
• Israel Museum Director Named One of 50 Most Influential People in the Art World in 2010. Accessed October 2, 2011
• Harvard Magazine