Bruce Museum Director and CEO Robert Wolterstorff to Depart

The Bruce Museum recently announced its executive director and CEO, Robert Wolterstorff, will be leaving his position on June 30.

Wolterstorff joined the Greenwich institution five years ago, leading its $68 million capital campaign for a major expansion titled “The New Bruce”. Top 200 collectors Steven and Alexandra Cohen donated $5 million from their charitable foundation in support of campaign in 2019.

The 43,000-square-foot addition, dedicated to exhibitions and public programing, opened last April. The education wing was named in honor of the Cohens.

“With the new building up and running, growing pains being thoughtfully addressed, new fiscal leadership in place, and the strategic plan providing a road map for the future, I feel like I have accomplished what I set out to do,” Wolterstorff said in a press statement. “It is a good moment for me to step away.”

Wolterstorff’s reference to fiscal leadership is the Bruce Museum’s appointment of Jonathan Rohner as the new chief operating officer (COO), effective immediately. The co-leadership position will report directly to the museum’s board of trustees.

Rohner was previously the director of finance and administration at the Yale Peabody Museum/Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS) in New Haven. He has also served in finance and business management positions at the Yale School of Art, the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre.

Rohner’s career in arts and business administration at museums and cultural organizations includes The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), as well as the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art.

Under Wolterstorff’s leadership, the museum added a collection of 70 works of art amassed by a local anonymous couple in 2022. Valued at $50 million, it was the largest art donation ever to the museum in its 112-year history.

Among the donated works was Edward Hopper‘s Bridle Path (1939), which sold for $10.2 million in 2012 at Christie’s, and Mary Cassat’s Two Little Sisters (1901-2), which sold for $519,000 in 2020. The collection also included pieces by Pablo Picasso, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore.

“A gift of this extent is a game changer,” Lisa Hayes Williams, an associate curator at the New Britain Museum of American Art, told ARTnews in 2022. 

The anonymous local donors also gave funds for the museum’s expansion, but the institution declined to specify the amount to ARTnews.

News of Wolterstorff’s departure was first reported by the Greenwich Free Press.