Yale University Art Gallery Names Its Next Director

Stephanie Wiles, an expert in old masters drawings and a museum leader at Cornell University, will be the next director of the Yale University Art Gallery, the university announced Wednesday.

She will succeed Jock Reynolds, who has run the gallery since 1998 but announced last year that he would step down at the end of this June. Wiles will take up her new post July 1.

“Stephanie shares my vision for integrating the arts into so much of what we do at Yale,” Peter Salovey, Yale’s president, said in a statement. “She is a respected leader and gifted communicator who understands that the arts can contribute to every aspect of teaching and learning on our campus.”

In a phone interview, Salovey said that the transition from Reynolds’ tenure to that of Wiles “will be a smooth one because Stephanie is very much an admirer of what Jock has accomplished — the two know each other and are admirers of each other — and Stephanie has been a leader now in a university and college art museum setting.”

After getting her doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001, Wiles began her career in the department of drawings and prints at the Morgan Library and Museum. She then worked at art museums at Oberlin College and Wesleyan University, before serving as director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell.

“The formative early years I spent at the Morgan Library taught me the importance of quality, connoisseurship and deep looking,” Wiles said in a statement. “It has been a joy to apply this same research and aesthetic expertise to learning about art from other cultures and contemporary arts practice in an academic setting.”

The Yale Art Gallery is the oldest college art museum in the United States. It holds more than 200,000 objects, including Vincent van Gogh’s “The Night Café” and Marcel Duchamp’s last painting on canvas, “Tu m’.”