Edward (Ned) Puchner, new Executive Director of Gallery North in Setauket, is the featured speaker at the Reboli Center for Art and History’s Third Friday event to be held Friday, January 17, from 6 – 8 PM. Mr. Puchner will discuss his interests as well as his experiences working in non-profit, community arts organizations.
Edward (Ned) Puchner has worked for over twenty years in the arts as curator, manager, and administrator for galleries, non-profits, and museums. He earned a BA in Art History from Carleton College, a master’s degree and doctorate in Art History from Indiana University, and a certificate in nonprofit management from Duke University’s Continuing Studies program. He currently serves as Executive Director for Gallery North.
Prior to coming to Gallery North, Puchner served as Executive Director for the Greenville Museum of Art, where he advanced the mission and goals of the organization through the development of new exhibition-related programming and fundraisers, as well as through improvements to the visitor experience and through the addition of the Creation Workshop, a new interactive, educational space for children and young adults, that encourages families to explore art making together. From 2012 to 2017, he served as Curator of Exhibitions for the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, where he created exhibitions centered on local history, visual artistry, notions of community, and cultural heritage.
Puchner has received fellowships from the Frederick Douglass Institute at the University of Rochester, the Luce Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ned has also worked at the Eskenazi Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He has published articles and reviews for Raw Vision magazine and served as a contributor to a number of exhibition catalogs. These exhibitions include the 2015 exhibition, Horace Pippin: The Way I See It, at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, and the 2016 exhibition, Richard Burnside: Who is King?, the only retrospective on the South Carolina artist, Richard Burnside. Other publications include his article “‘A Tried Stone’: Community, Conversion, and Christ in the Sculpture of William Edmondson” in the book, Beholding Christ and Christianity in African-American Art.
His research interests include African American art, American modernism, contemporary art, folk/self-taught/outsider art, and the material culture of American religions.