Paul Roth, currently senior curator and director of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has been appointed director of the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. His appointment at the centre—which just opened to the public in September 2012—is for a five-year term beginning in autumn 2013.
“My interest in leading Ryerson Image Centre is multifaceted,” Roth said in a release. “As a young institution with deep roots in an established and successful photography department, RIC has the opportunity to grow ambitiously. The RIC engenders a real opportunity to combine scholarship and populism—to encourage and support serious research while also providing a platform for smart exhibitions that appeal to a broad range of public interests.”
Roth has also held positions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Roth also served as executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation in New York.
At the Corcoran, Roth organized and co-organized “Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power” (2008) and “Sally Mann: What Remains” (2004), and, at the National Gallery of Art, “I…Dreaming: The Visionary Cinema of Stan Brakhage” (2002). In addition, Roth has helped organize the archives of photographers as Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Edward Weston.
Roth has some Toronto connections already. In 2009, he worked with photographer and Ryerson alumnus Edward Burtynsky to exhibit and publish his series “Oil” at the Corcoran. Two years later, Roth participated in the RIC’s Burtynsky symposium on the occasion of that show’s 2011 Toronto co-presentation by the Ryerson Image Centre (which had not yet opened its physical gallery) and the Royal Ontario Museum. More recently, he has served as a project research fellow studying Ryerson’s Black Star Collection holdings that document the Vietnam War protests at Chicago’s 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Doina Popescu, founding director of the RIC, announced her shift to becoming a distinguished visiting fellow at Ryerson University in June. She is due to work on special projects with Roth and other university officials.
