Diya Vij, a curator and present vp of curatorial and humanities programmes at Powerhouse Arts, has been picked to be New York Metropolis’s subsequent Division of Cultural Affairs (DCA) commissioner, sources with information of the decide advised ARTnews. The New York Occasions confirmed the information on Saturday.
Thought-about to be probably the most essential jobs within the metropolis’s arts ecosystem, the commissioner is a hotly watched position at any time when a brand new mayor enters workplace. The DCA is the most important municipal funder of the humanities within the US and supplies funding to over 800 cultural organizations all through the town’s 5 boroughs. Final fiscal yr, the DCA offered $245 million in funding. Naturally, the ascension of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose spouse, Rama Duwaji, is an artist, has intensified specualtion on who could be picked.
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Mamdani described Vij in a press release to the Times as a “visionary and deeply considerate chief who understands that artwork is just not decorative to this metropolis — it’s important to it.”
“Beneath Diya’s management, we are going to battle to maintain New York a metropolis the place artists can afford to dwell and create, and the place each New Yorker, in each borough, can expertise the vitality and inspiration that makes artwork potential,” the assertion reads.
Vij, 40, will report back to Julie Su, the town’s first deputy mayor for economic justice. Vij is the primary individual of South Asian descent to carry the commissioner position.
In November, Mamdani kicked off the hypothesis when he named the members of his arts and tradition transition committees, a 28-member group that included artwork sellers, curators, journalists, and humanities nonprofit directors. Amongst these chosen had been curator and author Kimberly Drew, Ruba Katrib, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1, Legacy Russell, govt director and chief curator on the Kitchen, and Gonzalo Casals, a former commissioner of cultural affairs for New York Metropolis.
Additionally on the committee was Vij, who was appointed to her place at Powerhouse, the Brooklyn-bsased hub for arts fabrication and programming, in November. It seems her tenure at Powerhouse was very short-lived. Previous to Powerhouse, Vij served as a curator at Creative Time the place she launched CTHQ, a gathering house for artists working on the intersection of artwork and politics, established a fellowship for socially engaged artists, relaunched the Inventive Time Summit, and helped understand a number of public artwork commissions. Shs beforehand served as an affiliate curator of public packages on the Excessive Line.
Vij served in the DCA for 4 and a half years, from 2014 to 2019 underneath De Blasio appointee Tom Finkelpearl, as a digital communications supervisor. She additionally launched and managed DCA’s Public Artists in Residence program and led the company’s Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion initiative. She began her profession on the Queens Museum, on the time additionally underneath Finkelpearl’s management, first as a curatorial fellow after which in digital communications.
Vij enters the workplace at a turbulent interval for the humanities. An unstable financial system and rising prices—each within the New York and throughout the US—has pressured many galleries to shut and artists to go away New York, whereas the Trump Administration has minimize grants and funding to arts organizations and tried to punish museums who don’t observe his administration’s directives on ideology and eliminating Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion initiatives. As Vij advised the Occasions, one other wrinkle is the lingering results of the pandemic.
“We see how our organizations should contract as a result of funding is contracting,” she stated, “as a result of there’s an uneven Covid restoration, as a result of there’s political intimidation coming from the federal authorities and the fitting.
“All this instability creates a panorama of concern that makes it actually tough for organizations to take the dangers that they should take, to handle the problems of the day and be areas for neighborhood to come back collectively in pleasure and creativeness and dissent.”
All through her profession, Vij has championed artwork that’s each difficult and politically engaged. Among the many initiatives she labored on was The World’s UnFair, a heralded 2023 installation in Lengthy Island Metropolis commissioned by Inventive Time. That piece, by New Pink Order, an indigenous artist collective, referred to as for the return of private and non-private lands to Indigenous folks.
“I’m excited to use my political lens to strengthening the programs that makes open, accessible and typically radical cultural actions potential,” Vij stated.
