Dallas Contemporary is a museum in the midst of change. Its recent past marred by financial deficits and internal discord, the Glass Street institution hired a new executive director in March, and today marks her first senior appointment.
The museum’s new executive director is Carolina Alvarez-Mathies, who began in May and who has chosen to import as a top aide Lucia Simek, who will serve as director of external affairs, a newly created executive position.
Simek, 41, who has spent the last eight years at the Nasher Sculpture Center, is known as a writer, artist, curator, and arts programmer, who brings two decades of experience to the new position.
At the Nasher, she served as senior manager of communications and international programs, overseeing media relations for such exhibitions as “Melvin Edwards: Five Decades,” “Phyllida Barlow: Tryst,” “Piero Golia’s Chalet Dallas, First Sculpture” and the experimental permanent collection show, “Mixtape.” She was also instrumental in launching the Nasher Prize in 2015.
Simek sees her role as being “the person who helps build the brand for the institution and create its outward-facing materials, language, programs — all the things that directly connect with the public.” She will also “work closely with the development team, doing grant-writing and fundraising.”
Simek arrives at a time when Dallas Contemporary is engaged in what some might call a recovery period. Its previous executive director, Peter Doroshenko, left when his contract expired in May.
Asked to assess the pros and cons of the Design District museum, Simek says: “Starting with the cons, there have been some bumps in the last decade. I can’t speak to what caused those things, or who was at fault for them, but they’ve had some hiccups. And they need to get over them.
“Over the last decade, Dallas Contemporary has established itself as the most provocative and progressive institution in the city, and I think there is so much potential to build on that identity, make it stronger and more rigorous, and I think Carolina has great plans to make that happen.”
She sees as part of her mission better relations with the press and with other institutions. “You know, trying to build bridges back, either whether they’ve failed or where they never were.”
She brings to the new job assets cultivated at the Nasher, which she calls “such a special place, a jewel in the crown of the city. It’s just amazing.”
Plus, it’s a museum with a strong sense of voice, which Simek hopes to bring to her new employer. She calls it “one of the strongest things about the Nasher — you know what it’s about.” It is, she says, a place “of excellence and deep integrity and innovation. I really think and hope that I can take those things to the Contemporary.”
In a statement, Alvarez-Mathies says she hopes that Simek’s “deep, respected ties to both the regional art community and those farther afield internationally will fortify the museum’s connections and impact.”
Simek will remain at the Nasher through Aug. 27 and begin at Dallas Contemporary on Sept. 1.
She is married to Gavin Morrison, a writer and curator from Scotland, and is the mother of three children from a previous marriage. Simek herself is one of eight children, among whom the only male is Will Arbery, a noted playwright, whose Heroes of the Fourth Turning finished as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
“I’m the second of eight. Will is the seventh of eight,” says Simek, who grew up in New Hampshire, which her parents left to move to Dallas when she was 16. Her parents are academicians who moved here to teach at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
During her time in Dallas, Simek concedes that the city’s art world has changed dramatically — for one by expanding “its global profile.” And now, she says, Dallas is a city “with incredible minds at work, under the surface of everything. Really incredible artists and thinkers. We’re getting to a place as a city where we’re starting to pay attention to those voices more. And the more we do that, the better the city will be. That’s a main goal of Carolina’s and mine, that we engage with those voices at every level, all of the time.”
