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 choose instructed ARTnews. The New York Instances confirmed the information on Saturday.
Thought-about to be one of the essential jobs within the metropolis’s arts ecosystem, the commissioner is a hotly watched function every time a brand new mayor enters workplace. The DCA is the biggest municipal funder of the humanities within the US and offers 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 can be picked.
Mamdani described Vij in a press release to the Instances as a “visionary and deeply considerate chief who understands that artwork shouldn’t be decorative to this metropolis — it’s important to it.”
“Below Diya’s management, we are going to battle to maintain New York a metropolis the place artists can afford to stay 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 financial justice. Vij is the primary individual of South Asian descent to carry the commissioner function.
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 Artistic Time the place she launched CTHQ, a gathering area for artists working on the intersection of artwork and politics; established a fellowship for socially engaged artists; relaunched the Artistic Time Summit; and helped notice a number of public artwork commissions. She beforehand served as an affiliate curator of public packages on the Excessive Line.
Vij has beforehand labored within 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 compelled many galleries to shut and artists to go away New York, whereas the Trump Administration has lower 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 instructed the Instances, one other wrinkle is the lingering results of the pandemic.
“We see how our organizations must contract as a result of funding is contracting,” she mentioned, “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 appropriate.”
She continued, “All this instability creates a panorama of concern that makes it actually troublesome for organizations to take the dangers that they should take, to handle the problems of the day and be areas for group to return 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 set up in Lengthy Island Metropolis commissioned by Artistic 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 individuals.
“I’m excited to use my political lens to strengthening the programs that makes open, accessible and generally radical cultural actions potential,” Vij mentioned.
