Alexandra Munroe to Succeed Michael Klein as Board Chair of Aspen Music Festival and School

IMMEDIATE RELEASE: JUNE 24, 2024
Press Contact:
Laura E. Smith, Vice President for Marketing and Communications
LSmith@aspenmusic.org

 

ALEXANDRA MUNROE TO SUCCEED MICHAEL KLEIN
AS BOARD CHAIR OF ASPEN MUSIC FESTIVAL AND SCHOOL

Transition to take place on July 1, 2024.

A devoted AMFS concertgoer for forty years, Klein concludes six years of impactful and stabilizing leadership, including guiding the institution through the COVID years, leading two strategic plans, giving important new scholarships, and providing key support for the future.

 

ASPEN, CO — The Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) Board of Trustees announces today that Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., will succeed Michael Klein as chair of the Board of Trustees, effective July 1, 2024.

Klein is a longtime board member of the AMFS and has served as chair since 2018. He says, “It has been an honor and pleasure to serve this great institution as the board chair for the past 6 years and I am grateful to continue serving as a trustee. Over the four decades I have been attending festival concerts, my greatest joy has been watching the young artists grow and transform. I am glad to be able to continue to support and witness this inspiring work. I welcome Alexandra as my eminently capable successor and look forward to all that she will bring to our bright future.”

Munroe has served on the AMFS Board of Trustees for 10 years. She says, “AMFS is one of Aspen’s major cultural institutions, unique in its mission and beloved by the community. But its impact extends far more broadly. It has been the summer home for generations of top young artists and outstanding faculty from across the country and around the world. Its superb staff led by Alan Fletcher and its dedicated board led by Mike Klein have brought AMFS to the extraordinary position it holds today. As we prepare to celebrate our historic 75th anniversary and to set an ambitious course for the years ahead, both for AMFS and the classical music field, I am excited to assume the role of chair. I look forward to working with our team, the board, the Aspen community, and with our thousands of artist alumni to help guide the future growth that builds creatively and imaginatively on our long history.”

 

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ABOUT ALEXANDRA MUNROE

Alexandra Munroe is an award-winning curator, Asia scholar and author focusing on art, culture and institutional global strategy. She is a pioneering authority on modern and contemporary art from Asia and a leading scholar of world art history. Over the course of her distinguished institutional career, she has impacted the strategic development of government, foundation and corporate partnerships across Asia and the Middle East while earning renown for her advocacy of expanded perspectives on the art of our time.

Raised in Japan and the U.S., Munroe received a BA from Sophia University, Tokyo; an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and a Ph.D. in East Asian History from New York University. She worked as an independent curator based in New York and Tokyo before, in 1998, becoming director of Japan Society Gallery, and later, Vice President of Arts and Culture at Japan Society, the leading organization dedicated to cultural and policy exchange between Japan and the United States. She led the society’s expansion of contemporary arts programming through such exhibitions as YES Yoko Ono (2000) and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subcultures (2005) curated by Takashi Murakami. Both critically-acclaimed exhibitions set record attendance for the organization.

In 2006, Munroe was appointed Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York – the first curatorial post of its kind in an international art museum. Under her leadership, the Guggenheim has presented groundbreaking exhibitions and scholarly publications on Asian art in a global context and has expanded its mission across the Guggenheim’s constellation to study, acquire and exhibit art from beyond the Western world. In 2013, the Guggenheim launched The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative under Munroe’s direction with a $10 million grant to advance the study, exhibition and acquisition of contemporary art from China in a global context. A founding curator of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project since 2007, she served as Senior Curator and Director, Curatorial Affairs, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi from 2018-2023, where she led the foundational curatorial program, collection growth, and research initiatives shaping the future museum.

Munroe is internationally recognized as one of the most influential scholar-curators of her generation. Her survey exhibition Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994-95) initiated the academic and curatorial field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Her work has established the international study and mainstream appreciation of several Asian-born artists through such exhibitions as: Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective (1989); YES Yoko Ono (2000); Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe (2008); Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity (2011) and Gutai: Splendid Playground (2013). The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 (2009), which explored Asian influence on American culture, received the inaugural Chairman’s Special Award of $1,000,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her recent project Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (2017-19), attracted more than one million visitors over its three-city tour and was selected Top Ten Exhibitions of 2017 by The New York Times and among the Top 25 “most influential shows of the decade” by ArtNews.

Her 2024 exhibition, Yu Hong: Another One Bites the Dust, is on view concurrently with the 60th Venice Biennale. It features a soundscape by Nico Muhly commissioned by Works & Process and was selected among the “Top 8 Hits” of the Biennale by The New York Times.

Munroe is a trustee of the Aspen Music Festival and School and an officer of the American Academy in Rome. Her past and current board service includes the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Longhouse Reserve; PEN America; and the US-Japan Foundation. As Vice President of The Rosenkranz Foundation, her philanthropy supports palliative care curriculum development at Mass General Hospital and Yale University Hospital. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former member of the Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD).

Munroe received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan; and is the 2024 recipient of the Japan Society Award, America’s most prestigious recognition of service in the Japan-US space.

Munroe is married to financier Robert Rosenkranz whose philanthropic initiatives include civil discourse, time-based media, and scientific research to extend human health spans. They are based in New York City and London and have been residents of Red Mountain since 2012. Robert Rosenkranz is a member of Aspen Strategy Group and his Open to Debate Foundation, co-founded with Munroe, produces a podcast and a weekly NPR program that engages some 6 million listeners annually. The organization has presented numerous live debates in conjunction with Aspen Ideas Festival. The exhibition Mountain Time at the Aspen Art Museum in 2022 was drawn primarily from the Rosenkranz collection of time-based media art. Their Aspen residence has an “art barn” which frequently welcomes visiting artists and musicians and stages events for Aspen institutions including AMFS.

For more information see www.alexandramunroe.com.

 

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ABOUT MICHAEL KLEIN

Michael Klein has been coming to Aspen for more than 40 years and lives in Aspen and Washington D.C. He has been on the board of the Aspen Music Festival and School since 2009 and has served as board chair since 2018. He also sits on the board of The Aspen Institute.

His background as a securities lawyer led him to believe in the importance of information for efficient decision-making, and in the use of information technology to contribute to the betterment of society. In 1987, he co-founded CoStar Group, Inc. to address the issues that led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.

Klein applied the same principles to co-found The Sunlight Foundation in 2005 to improve the transparency and thus the accountability of our democratic government. Similarly, he founded Gun Violence Archive, Inc., which maintains a free online archive of all verifiable incidents of gun use in the United States. He also co-founded the Global Warming Mitigation Project, which awards prizes for promising new ideas to mitigate global warming.

Among many other cultural, business and philanthropic endeavors, he served as the chair of the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C., as a director of Jose Andres’s ThinkFoodGroup, Inc., of the innovative DC Central Kitchen, and of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

For more information see www.mikeklein.com.

 

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ABOUT THE ASPEN MUSIC FESTIVAL AND SCHOOL

The AMFS is the United States’ premier classical music center for performance and education, presenting more than 400 musical events during its eight-week summer season in Aspen. The organization draws top classical musicians from around the world for a rich combination of performances of orchestral works, opera, chamber music, recitals, contemporary music, works by new or previously unrecognized voices, popular genres, family events, and talks, competitions, and classes.

About 500 music students from 40 U.S. states and 40 countries come each summer to play in four orchestras, sing, conduct, compose and study with more than 100 artist-faculty members who come from the orchestras of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, the Metropolitan Orchestra, and the leading conservatories and music schools like The Juilliard School, The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and The Colburn School. Students represent the field’s best talent; many have already begun their professional careers, and others are on the cusp.

The AMFS is deeply committed to community and many events are free, including seating outside the Music Tent on the David Karetsky Music Lawn and in the Kaye Music Garden. Regular livestreams are free anywhere in the world. The AMFS also runs music programs in-school and after-school at most schools in the Roaring Fork Valley.

Renowned alumni include violinists Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang, Midori, Gil Shaham, and Robert McDuffie; pianists Joyce Yang, Orli Shaham, Conrad Tao, Yuja Wang, and Wu Han; conductors Marin Alsop, James Conlon, Leonard Slatkin and Joshua Weilerstein; composers William Bolcom, Philip Glass, David Lang, Augusta Read Thomas, Bright Sheng and Joan Tower; vocalists Isabel Leonard, Jamie Barton, Sasha Cooke, Danielle de Niese, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw and Tamara Wilson; cellist Alisa Weilerstein; guitarist Sharon Isbin; bassist Edgar Meyer; and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

 

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Season Information
The AMFS’s 75th anniversary season will run June 26 to August 18, 2024.

Aspen Music Festival and School
970-925-9042 box office phone
970-925-3254 administration phone

225 Music School Road
Aspen, CO 81611

www.aspenmusicfestival.com  |  info@aspenmusic.org

 

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