Richard Armstrong (museum director)

Richard Armstrong
Born	1949 Kansas City, Missouri, US
Nationality	American
Education	Lake Forest College Université de Dijon The Sorbonne
Occupation	Museum director
Organization	Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Richard Armstrong (born 1949) is an American museum director. Since 2008, Armstrong has been the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City and its other museums throughout the world. Before joining the Guggenheim, he was a curator at, and then director of, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Previously, he had been a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In addition to supervising the operations and exhibitions of the Guggenheim foundation's museums, Armstrong's tenure has included several collaborations with various organizations to offer programs intended to broaden the foundation's collection and activities geographically and digitally.

Armstrong was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. During his summer vacations as a teenager in the 1960s, he worked as a page for U.S. Representative Richard Bolling and U.S. Senator Stuart Symington. During these hot summers in Washington, D.C., he visited air-conditioned museums, especially the National Gallery of Art. In 1968, after a year at Lake Forest College in Illinois, and shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Armstrong moved to Dijon, France. There he explored French art and architecture.

Armstrong soon began to study at the Université de Dijon and then at the Sorbonne. Living in an unheated apartment, he spent time at the Louvre, finding the warm museum as welcoming during the Parisian winter as the cool ones had been in earlier summers. Armstrong returned to finish his BA degree in Art History at Lake Forest in 1973.

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