Amid Ongoing Layoffs, Brown University Furloughs Both Bell Gallery Curators, Rankling Faculty

Both of the curators at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, were furloughed on December 4, according to an internal message shared with ARTnews. Kate Kraczon, director of exhibitions and chief curator, and Thea Quiray Tagle, associate curator, will both work until early 2026.

The Bell exhibits contemporary art and is part of the Brown Arts Institute. The school is facing a substantial financial crunch that has led to layoffs and other austerity measures.

Kraczon was hired in 2019 after 11 years as associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. While there, she championed emerging artists, notably curating “Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson: Easternsports” (2014) and “Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: The Incidental Insurgents” (2015). The 2018 show “Ree Morton: The Plant That Heals May Also Poison” was awarded a commendation by the inaugural Sotheby’s Prize for an “exhibition that breaks new ground” and was featured in Artforum’s “Best of 2018” issue.

Tagle, previously independent, had co-curated “New York Now: Home” (2023), the inaugural contemporary photography triennial at the Museum of the City of New York, and curated exhibitions for institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Vachon Gallery at Seattle University; and the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries.

The school has made no public mention of the furloughs of Kraczon and Tagle. Sydney Skybetter, the director of the Brown Arts Institute, referred a request for an interview to the university’s VP for communications, Brian E. Clark, who said in an email that the school could not comment on personnel matters but noted that “the Bell Gallery remains an important public art space on Brown’s campus and program of the Brown Arts Institute. Works from its permanent collections and exhibitions by visiting artists will continue to be accessible to both the campus community and the public.” He noted that Brown eliminated 55 vacant budgeted positions and implemented layoffs affecting 48 positions across campus in the fall, across a range of departments, “as part of a broader set of financial measures to offset expected losses in Brown’s budget from ongoing federal impacts.”

Two members of the Brown faculty, speaking off the record, said that the faculty was taken by surprise by the decision and has been unable to get clear explanations from administration about what was behind the decision, except that austerity has been invoked. Art students and instructors make extensive use of the Bell gallery as part of their curricula, said the faculty members. It’s apparently unclear who will be responsible for future programming, and Clark did not immediately respond to an email asking who will be in charge of programming.

The Bell, named for a 1954 alum, holds a collection of more than 7,000 works of art, dating from the 16th century to the present, with a focus on modern and contemporary works on paper. Artists from Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn to Rina Banerjee, Chitra Ganesh, and Nari Ward are included, and the gallery’s website highlights recent acquisitions by Sadie Barnette, Martine Gutierrez, and Deana Lawson. It opened in the Philip Johnson–designed Albert and Vera List art building in 1971. 

Its most recent listed exhibition, of works by Eric-Paul Riege, closed in early December. Its previous exhibition restaged artist Julien Creuzet’s project for the French Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which had originated in 2020, co-commissioned by the Bell and Le Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble. In 2022, the Bell hosted the widely praised touring exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” exploring the impact of the US prison system on contemporary art and curated by MacArthur “genius” award-winning curator Nicole R. Fleetwood. Other recent exhibitions were devoted to artists including Barbara T. Smith and Carrie Mae Weems.

While it is not public on the Bell’s website, its next exhibition, according to a source with knowledge of the gallery’s programming, is “Prisoners of Love,” by the Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The exhibition is currently on view at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK and will be on view this year at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

The Bell’s exhibitions have earned support from prominent funders. The Riege show was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Creuzet show by Warhol as well as the Teiger Foundation, Villa Albertine, and Institut Français. Bell shows have been covered in publications including Hyperallergic and Art21.

News of the furloughs comes two years after Brown opened the high-tech, 101,000-square-foot Lindemann Performing Arts Center. While the construction budget wasn’t made public, two sources inside the university told ARTnews the cost was said to be $500 million. Designed by Joshua Ramus, founding principal of New York firm REX, the facility was named for Frayda B. Lindemann and her late husband, George Lindemann Sr., the billionaire art collector and chairman and CEO of Southern Union, a fossil fuel infrastructure and pipeline company. Some of their children attended Brown. (Their son Adam is a prominent New York art collector who in 2025 closed his New York gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, after 14 years.)

The school says that it is facing a fiscal year 2026 deficit of some $30 million, and, in addition to layoffs, is selling off some real estate holdings, reported Forbes in October. The school had previously implemented a hiring freeze and implemented a pay cut for some top staff. It has taken out loans totaling some $800 million in the past year.

The news also follows several months of strain and trauma on campus apart from the financial crunch. The school was one of several elite universities targeted for pressure by the Trump administration to comply with its preferences on subjects such as transgender athletes and programs supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. The administration, which accused the school of insufficiently opposing antisemitism during pro-Palestinian protests, as it did other universities, had withheld millions of dollars in federal medical and health sciences research funding to exert leverage. In July, the school inked a deal with the administration. 

“The University’s foremost priority throughout discussions with the government was remaining true to our academic mission, our core values and who we are as a community at Brown,” university president Christina H. Paxson wrote. “This is reflected in key provisions of the resolution agreement preserving our academic independence, as well as a commitment to pay $50 million in grants over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island, which is aligned with our service and community engagement mission.”

The administration’s readout was, naturally, quite different. “The Trump administration is successfully reversing the decades-long woke-capture of our nation’s higher education institutions,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.

Then, on December 13, a gunman entered a Brown classroom and killed two people and wounded nine others before fleeing the campus. After a week-long manhunt, police discovered the body of the killer in a storage unit in New Hampshire, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The killer is believed to have also slain an M.I.T. professor who was killed at his home two days after the Brown shooting.