Museum of Fine Arts hires new executive director

Klaudio Rodriguez has been named Executive Director and CEO of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, following nearly two years of uncertainty and controversy at the venerable local instituion.

Rodriguez comes to the city from New York, where he spent seven years with the Bronx Museum of the Arts, since 2020 as executive director.

Nicaragua-born and Miami-raised, Rodriguez – who will start work at the MFA in October –  served as Chief Curator at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University.

He holds a BA in Art History with a Minor in Photography, a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, and an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, specializing in modern and contemporary Latin American art, from Florida International University.

Anne-Marie Russell, who succeeded longtime Museum of Fine Arts director Kristen A. Shepherd in 2022, stepped down from the position a year later after she became the center of a windstorm of controversy.

She fired Michael Bennett, the museum’s senior curator of Early Western Art, after the Denver Art Museum questioned the provenance (documented history of ownership) of certain Greek antiquities on loan from St. Petersburg.

The Denver museum director suggested postponing the exhibit until the provenance issue could be straightened out.

Instead, Russell fired Bennett. He was escorted from the building.

A furious Belinda Dumont, a member of the Museum of Fine Arts’ board of trustees, defended Bennett. “Ninety percent of these items were sold even before the United Nations and everyone else recognized it, before 1970 outside its country of origin,” she told the Catalyst last September, when the news became public. “Which is very hard to determine sometimes. Especially with old things.”

Dumont continued: “Everything that’s in art museums, antiquities that are there or anywhere else, may have very little provenance,” she said. “They have very little proof of who used to own it, and when. But that does not mean it was looted.”

Russell’s imminent departure was announced in November.

Constructed in 1965, the Museum of Fine Arts is the oldest art museum in St. Petersburg.