The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, named Allison Blais as its new president and CEO starting in January 2026.
Blais, who will replace Jeffrey N. Brown after five years in the role, is currently executive vice president and chief strategy and operations officer of New York’s 9/11 Memorial & Museum, both of which she worked on from early planning stages, including a stint at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
In a statement, Duffield Ashmead IV MD, chair of the Wadsworth’s board, said, “Allison has had great success overseeing large-scale capital projects in New York City while demonstrating her ability to work with a broad range of stakeholders at an institution of national relevance. We look forward to her partnership with museum director Matthew Hargraves, and a bright future here at the Wadsworth.”
Blais said, “Growing up outside Hartford, I came to know the Wadsworth as a place where timeless masterpieces live alongside timely discoveries. Under Jeff Brown’s leadership and the board’s guidance, the museum is embracing a renewed sense of identity and purpose, and museum director Matthew Hargraves is advancing a compelling vision that both honors its history and energizes it in powerful ways.”
The Wadsworth was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth, one of the first American patrons of art, and stakes a claim as the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the U.S.
In a 2024 Washington Post roundup of the 20 best American art museums (in which the Wadsworth ranked #18), art critic Sebastian Smee wrote, “Its baroque, surrealist and Hudson River School holdings are tremendous. It boasts the Serge Lifar collection of Ballets Russes drawings and costumes, the Samuel Colt firearms collection, a terrific “Wunderkammer” display, great costumes and textiles, and destination paintings by, among others, William Holman Hunt, Caravaggio, Joseph Wright of Derby and Norman Rockwell.”
Smee also praised the museum’s Matrix program for contemporary art, which is currently presenting an exhibition by Sofía Gallisá Muriente that includes a video about a Puerto Rican nationalist who pulled off a major bank heist in Hartford in 1983.
