DUBAI: Valerie Hillings will serve as the inaugural director of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi announced, placing her at the helm of one of the most consequential museum openings in the region’s recent history.
The appointment is a concrete operational step forward for an institution that has been years in the making. Hillings’ mandate is specific: execute the museum’s opening strategy, establish its operational framework, and deliver inaugural exhibitions and programming. The institution is set to open within Saadiyat Cultural District, Abu Dhabi’s expanding cultural hub that already houses Louvre Abu Dhabi, Zayed National Museum, Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi and teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi.
Her prior involvement with this exact project is what distinguishes this appointment from a conventional hire. Between 2009 and 2018, Hillings served as curator and associate director of curatorial affairs for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, working directly with the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi on collection strategy, acquisitions, pre-opening programming and the development of Frank Gehry’s architectural design for the building. She knows the blueprints, literally and institutionally.
Before returning to Abu Dhabi, Hillings served as director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, a role she took on in 2018. There, she led a full renovation of the permanent collection galleries, grew the collection by approximately 400 works and brought annual attendance to 1.2 million visitors. That track record of managing large-scale institutional change will be directly tested in Abu Dhabi.
The physical scale of what she is being asked to open is substantial. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will contain 30 galleries across 11,600 square meters of interior exhibition space, with an additional 23,000 square meters set aside for outdoor exhibition areas. That combined footprint, once operational, would position it among the world’s largest platforms for modern and contemporary art.
Hillings holds a doctorate and master’s degree in art history and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and an undergraduate degree in art history from Duke University, with specialization in modern and contemporary art, the period spanning the 1960s to the present that will anchor the museum’s curatorial identity.
She described the appointment in terms of continuity rather than arrival. “I am honored to return to Abu Dhabi to complete the once-in-a-lifetime journey of founding and opening Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a museum developed in the United Arab Emirates by colleagues from both the region and around the world. I look forward to welcoming local and global audiences to the magnificent Frank Gehry-designed building and inviting them to explore points of interconnection and unique stories through the lens of art from the 1960s to our time.”
What remains to be seen is whether the institutional groundwork laid over more than a decade translates smoothly into an opening that matches the ambition of the building itself.