These days, New York Magazine seems to be tracking the fate of powerhouse women in New York. Here are links to two articles from recent and current issues. Are they trying to make a connection or do I detect a whiff of Schadenfreude?
Alanna Heiss in 1976, the year she founded P.S. 1.
(Photo: Richard Avedon/© 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation)
The Principal of P.S. 1
Can Alanna Heiss's vision for her museum outlast her?
By Andrew M. Goldstein
Published May 2, 2008
Alanna Heiss, the founder and director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, is walking through the Long Island City museum's empty courtyard and pointing out the spectral traces of exhibitions past. "If you look there, you see the ghost of an outdoor Judd," Heiss says, indicating where a stack of Donald Judd boxes left an imprint on a concrete wall. "Out here was John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, and Richard Nonas had a piece on the ground. You can actually see the ghosts." A self-described "art radical," Heiss is P.S. 1's driving force, a woman whose freewheeling, quick-moving, anti-corporate style gave the center its vitality. Over 32 years, she built P.S. 1 into one of the city's most refreshingly unpredictable venues for contemporary art, drawing crowds of young, aggressively hip visitors to see its exhibitions and join in its boozy summer dance parties. But when P.S. 1 was merged into the Museum of Modern Art in 2000, it became an open question how long its idiosyncratic impresario would remain at the helm. Last fall, with former Walker Art Center director Kathy Halbreich on her way to 53rd Street to revamp the Modern's contemporary-art programming, MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry asked Heiss - the last founder to still run a major New York museum - to retire. Set to step down by the end of this year, Heiss faces the prospect of becoming a ghost in her own institution.
[read on...]There's a cool time line of P.S. 1 at the end of the article.
Zoe Cruz at the foreign-exchange trading desk in 1997.
(Photo: Tony Rinaldo)
Only the Men Survive
The crash of Zoe Cruz
By Joe Hagan
Published Apr 27, 2008
One morning last November, Zoe Cruz walked the length of hallway from her executive suite at Morgan Stanley to the office of her boss, chairman and CEO John Mack, who'd called her in for an impromptu meeting. The distance, roughly 50 feet, represented the final leg of her journey to the highest echelons of Wall Street: Three weeks earlier, the 63-year-old Mack had signaled that Cruz was his first choice to replace him as the head of Morgan Stanley when he retired.She had come far from the trading floor where she'd started 25 years ago. She had survived mergers, regime changes, and uncertain markets, not to mention the deeply ingrained sexism of Wall Street. With Mack's help, she had risen through the ranks of upper management to become, at age 52, one of the most powerful and highest-paid women - people - in finance. She thought that she was ready for what was coming next.
