Westbeth Corp appoints Ellen Salpeter as its first President and CEO

Ellen Salpeter photo:Grace Roselli

ARTnews
October 17, 2019

After stepping down last year as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Ellen Salpeter will take on a position outside the museum world—and will relocate to a new city in the process.

Westbeth Artists’ Housing, a New York–based nonprofit that provides affordable housing and studio spaces to artists, has named Salpeter as its first president and CEO. She will take up her new role on November 1, and focus on institutional growth and forging connections with other artist residency and housing programs across country.

“It’s a nice time to reflect on [Westbeth’s] story, which is pretty extraordinary, but it also offers us an opportunity to look forward to the next phase of Westbeth and position us as a resource for a future generation of artists,” Salpeter told ARTnews of the organization’s 50th anniversary year, which is coming up in 2020. “I think we have a fundamental role in keeping cultural producers in New York.”

Westbeth, which has been providing visual, performing, and literary artists with affordable housing and studio space since 1970, is based in a multi-building complex in the West Village of Manhattan, near the Whitney Museum. Throughout its history, Westbeth has hosted the famed choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, photographers Diane Arbus and Karl Bissinger, painter Robert De Niro Sr., filmmaker Barbara Hammer, and more. But the organization’s history includes more than just housing artists: it was the site of the founding of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, and it was an early space for New York City’s first LGBTQ synagogue.

Read full article by Claire Selvin in ARTnews