UMD Tweed Museum of Art announces new director
Like this?
Log in to share your opinion with MPR News and add it to your profile.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
University of Minnesota Duluth has named Julie Delliquanti as the director of the Tweed Museum of Art. She will begin the role June 10.
“I love working on university campuses,” Delliquanti said. “The Tweed is just a really exciting place to be at this particular moment, and I’m excited about being in Duluth.”
Delliquanti comes to the Tweed from the University of California Irvine’s Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, where she was the head of visitor experience.
While Delliquanti is from California, she has worked in Minnesota before as a museum educator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, as well as managing the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund’s traveling documentary photography exhibition “Portraits of Home: In Search of Shelter in Greater Minnesota.”
Support the News you Need
Gifts from individuals keep MPR News accessible to all - free of paywalls and barriers.
She has also held roles at the Oklahoma Contemporary art center, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archive and Rare Book Library.
“What I love about the Tweed is that it is situated really in kind of the center, an intersection of campus,” Delliquanti said. “Faculty can use it as a place to bring students in their courses. I think the location of it makes it a place that feels like it’s very much in the heart of campus, and to me that’s important, because I think that university art museums are positioned to be these places to bring people together.”
Delliquanti said she will begin her tenure by doing a “listening tour” to find out what has been working for the museum and what the community needs, as well as possible community partnerships. And hiring a curator will be key, as the museum currently does not have one, she said.
The museum will also celebrate its 75th anniversary in the fall of 2025, so Delliquanti will start planning for that soon, which includes digging into the Tweed’s collections.
“A pretty significant strength is its works on paper, so print and photography,” she said. “The Tweed has done an excellent job centering the artwork and the perspectives and the histories of Native and First Nations and Indigenous contemporary artists, which I think is really important, especially given where the university is located.”
Proceeding Delliquanti, Ken Bloom led the museum for 15 years, retiring in 2019.
Anja Chávez began as director in 2020 and left in 2022.
