Just days after announcing that Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open this December, the museum said Valerie Hillings will be its inaugural director. Hillings is returning to the Guggenheim’s United Arab Emirates outpost after previously serving as associate director of curatorial affairs from 2009 to 2018.
For the past eight years, Hillings has led the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) in Raleigh. Her leadership there included acquisitions for the “People’s Collection,” a reframing of the museum’s holdings through the idea of public accessibility. During her tenure, NCMA’s collecting priorities also focused on works by women, LGBTQIA+, minority, and local artists.
Although the appointment is a strategic one, it also renews scrutiny of the controversy surrounding the exploitation and harsh forced labor conditions faced by migrant construction workers who helped build the museum, along with the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the New York University campus, on Saadiyat Island.
Those labor conditions have prompted repeated protest actions and calls to boycott the Guggenheim Foundation over the past 15 years. The issue continues to shadow the institution as it prepares to open its Abu Dhabi branch.
Before joining NCMA, Hillings worked for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation from 2004 to 2018. She started on the curatorial team at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, where she co-organized and curated topical and collection-based exhibitions in New York and abroad. In 2009, two years before construction began on the Frank Gehry-designed building, she was selected to develop the Abu Dhabi collection in partnership with the city’s Department of Culture and Tourism.
The museum’s expanding collection and upcoming exhibitions will focus on art and artistic movements from 1960 onward that “reflect and advance Abu Dhabi’s role as a catalyst for creative production and innovation in the arts,” according to a press release from the Guggenheim Foundation.
