Suzanne Delehanty is principal of SUZANNE DELEHANTY LLC which she established in 2006 to provide strategic planning and art advisory services for initiatives that bring art, artists and communities together. The firm serves an international roster of clients. Clients include a center for artists' residences in printmaking in Hawai'i, a private collector, a family foundation as well as such institutions as the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the Museum fur Neue Kunst (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. For NMAI, Delehanty is working on a modern and contemporary Native art initiative under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. For ZKM she is a contributor to a major publication on the late American artist Paul Thek; ZKM, Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg, and MIT Press are jointly publishing the book for release in 2008.
The firm draws upon Delehanty's three decades of museum experience In 1995, Delehanty was appointed Director of the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami, which became the Miami Art Museum (MAM) in 1996. From 1996 to 2005, Delehanty directed MAM and in 2005 was named Founding Director of the institution which she helped to establish. Under her leadership, the institution privatized, uniting a department of county government known as the Center for Fine Arts with a private support group.
She started MAM's permanent collection, which focuses on international art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The collection has already attracted widespread praise. Art in America called it "the quintessential Miami collection." She also established the largest art museum education program in Miami-Dade County, and created one of the most ambitious special exhibition programs in the country.
During Delehanty's watch, the Miami Art Museum secured a prominent waterfront site from the City of Miami for a new freestanding museum and sculpture garden. She provided leadership for the successful passage of a $2.9 billion Miami-Dade County General Obligation Bond program. In 2004, by a 65 percent majority vote, the Miami Art Museum was awarded $100 million in capital funding from this initiative.
From 1989 to 1995, Delehanty was director at the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM) in Houston and was an independent curator and consultant in New York. At CAM she created national and international tours of CAM-originated exhibitions, developed an education department to extend the museum's ties to the community and secured a National Endowment for the Arts challenge grant to build CAM's endowment.
Delehanty served as director of the Neuberger Museum at State University of New York in Purchase from 1978-88. During her tenure, she established a clear direction for the growth and conservation of the museum's collection. To secure the museum's prosperity, she expanded its base of private support and created an endowment fund with what at the time was the largest private gift in the history of the State University of New York system.
Delehanty began her career in Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania which gained national prominence during her directorship from 1971 to 1978.
In addition to her role in advancing the long-range plans of the institutions she has led, Delehanty has organized numerous exhibitions and publications. Most recently, she spearheaded the Converge™ publications to document the Miami Art Museum's new work series dedicated to cultural diversity. Her essay on Cy Twombly was reprinted in Writing on Cy Twombly, published by Schirmer/Mosel Publishers, Munich, in 2002.
At the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, solo exhibitions of the work of Fred Sandback, James Lee Byars, Tony Cragg, Guillermo Kuitca were mounted during her watch. While leading the Neuberger Museum, she curated Soundings in 1981 and The Window in Twentieth-Century Art in 1986.
When Delehanty directed the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania, she organized Agnes Martin in 1973; Cy Twombly: Paintings, Drawings and Constructions 1952-74 in 1975, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Video Art, which was selected as the United States entry for the 1975 Biennial in Sao Paulo. Between 1976 to 1978, she organized, among other shows, national touring exhibitions of the work of George Segal and Richard Artschwager for ICA.
Delehanty has served on numerous committees and boards, among them the Art Museum Advisory Council at Princeton University; the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions; and the Committee for Art in Public Places, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Museums of Florida History, Tallahassee, and the Advisory Council of Art for the Twenty-First Century, New York.
Delehanty has participated in cultural exchange programs in Bulgaria under the auspices of the United States Department of State, and at the United States Art Professional Study Tour of Japan. Her professional and civic affiliations include the Association of Art Museum Directors and the International Women's Forum.
Born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, Delehanty now resides in Miami. She holds a B.A. in History of Art from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and has pursued graduate studies in History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also benefited from ongoing executive education at Columbia, Yale and Harvard universities.