Stuart Graff, president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, announced this week he plans to step down from his role. The intellectual property lawyer has helmed the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation the past eight years. This makes him the Foundation’s longest standing president since Frank Lloyd Wright.
Graff is set to take a new position at CulturalMaterial, an art consultancy, according to reporting in Dezeen. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation will soon begin a national search to fill Graff’s role.
“The board really wants to make sure that the person who fills Stuart’s shoes is just as visionary, and is just as prepared to lead us into the next phase of who we’re going to be,” Henry Hendrix, a spokesperson for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, told AN.
During the transition, Graff will stay on in an advisory capacity at Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and help steer some of the projects he initiated like its new comprehensive master plan by Sasaki and the Taliesin Institute.
“We will continue to use the property here at Taliesin West as we currently do, and then build on that,” Hendrix continued. “We will continue to preserve the Taliesin West property, just as we will the property in Wisconsin, making sure that the buildings and the grounds are structurally sound, healthy, and usable.”
Graff navigated the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation through bumpy times, and he’s had many critics. Throughout his tenure, which began in 2016, students and faculty said that Graff created a “climate of fear,” allegations which Graff denied. There were also tensions between Graff and Aaron Betsky, SoAT’s former president.
Things perhaps got most heated when Graff and his team almost closed the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in 2019. That resulted in the school changing its name to the School of Architecture at Taliesin and its relocation to Arcosanti.
In a 2020 op-ed for AN titled Shame on the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Ryan Scavnicky wrote that Graff’s leadership put “the final nail in the coffin of Frank Lloyd Wright’s grand and timely pedagogical legacy just to line their pockets.” Graff responded to Scavnicky’s opinion piece with his own op-ed, defending his administration.
Moving forward, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation will announce its search in the coming days. Hendrix noted however that there isn’t a specific timeline for hiring the Foundation’s new president and CEO. “It will take the time that it takes,” Hendrix shared, “but we’re excited about what the future holds.”
