The Wadsworth Athenaeum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has named Alison Bryce its new president and chief executive officer, effective January 2026.
Bryce, who will succeed Jeffrey N. Brown after five years in the role and currently serves as executive vice president and chief strategy and operations officer of the New York 9/11 Memorial and Museum, has been involved with both projects from their early planning stages, including a stint with the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
“Alison has had great success overseeing large-scale capital projects in New York City while demonstrating her ability to work with a broad range of stakeholders across national agencies,” Duffield Ashmead IV MD, chairman of the Wadsworth Museum’s board of directors, said in a statement. “We look forward to her collaboration with Museum Director Matthew Hargraves and her bright future at the Wadsworth Museum.”
“I grew up outside of Hartford and came to know the Wadsworth Museum as a place where timeless masterpieces and timely discoveries coexist,” said Bryce. “Under the leadership of Jeff Brown and the guidance of the Board of Trustees, the museum is embracing a new sense of identity and purpose, and museum director Matthew Hargraves is advancing a compelling vision that both honors its history and energizes it in powerful ways.”
The Wadsworth Museum was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, one of the earliest art patrons in the United States, and is known as the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States.
in 2024 washington post Art critic Sebastian Smee wrote in his list of The 20 Best Art Museums in the United States (including the Wadsworth at No. 18): “The Baroque, Surrealist, and Hudson River School collections here are huge. It has Serge Lifar’s collection of Ballets Russes paintings and costumes, Samuel Colt’s A collection of firearms, a wonderful “Wunderkammer” exhibition, fine costumes and textiles, and destination paintings by the likes of Holman Hunt, Caravaggio, Derby’s Joseph Wright and Norman Rockwell.”
Smee also praised the museum’s Contemporary Art Matrix program, which is currently hosting an exhibition on Sofía Gallisá Muriente, which includes a video of a major bank robbery in Hartford carried out by Puerto Rican nationalists in 1983.
