Mildred Friedman, curator who showcased Frank Gehry, dies
Mildred "Mickey" Friedman, a curator with a sharp eye for emerging talent who mounted a landmark 1986 show at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center that brought international attention to architect Frank Gehry, died Sept. 3 in Manhattan. She was 85. Credit: Getty Images / Desiree Navarro
Mildred "Mickey" Friedman, a curator with a sharp eye for emerging talent who mounted a landmark 1986 show at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center that brought international attention to architect Frank Gehry, died Sept. 3 in Manhattan. She was 85.
Her death after a long illness was confirmed by her daughter, Lise Friedman.
During more than two decades at the Walker, Friedman showcased the work of a generation of architects and designers who went on to renown, including Gehry, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Thom Mayne, Steven Holl, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams.
Other important shows she organized focused on the influence of the avant-garde Dutch art movement, De Stijl, and the modernist furniture of George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames, Alexander Girard and Robert Propst for the Herman Miller company.
She made the Walker into "America's leading museum of design," Architectural Record magazine said when she and her husband, longtime Walker director Martin L. Friedman, retired in 1990.
"Museums are supposed to be validators of the greats, not promoters of the unknown," Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art for 15 years, said in explaining the conventional wisdom Friedman often defied. "Frank Gehry was a perfect example. It wasn't just that she gave him a show . . . but she promoted him. She was one of the first to sense that her role was not to take care of the past but to create the future."
Mildred Shenberg majored in design at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she met Martin Friedman. They were married in 1949.
Mildred Friedman was working as an interior designer in Minneapolis when she signed on as a consultant helping architect Edward Larrabee Barnes design furnishings for a new building for the Walker. In 1969, she joined the museum's staff as editor of its journal, Design Quarterly. In 1979, she was named design curator.
After leaving the Walker, Friedman and her husband moved back to New York, where she continued to organize shows, including a major 2001 Gehry retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.
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