Kaywin Feldman, former director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, is not just winning these days. She is #Kaywinning.
The education division at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where Feldman took over March 11 as its first-ever female director, started that hashtag for her during her first week on the job. (So far it's been used about six times, including by folks at the Washington Post and by @veganmacncheese, whose tweet is gibberish).
#Kaywinning has even wound up on a button made by Mel Harper, a member of the National Gallery's education department.
"She's very funny, and she said she wanted to meet us all. That really stuck with me," said Harper to the Washington Post.
The new hashtag is just part of the huge media buzz that Feldman has received. Every one of the dozens of articles cite the biggest news about Feldman's arrival: That she is the fifth director and the first-ever woman director, succeeding Earl A. "Rusty" Powell III. She is also only the second woman directing one of the U.S.'s top encyclopedic art museums.
Feldman is currently working on learning all 1,200 of her employee's names, a more daunting task than she had at Mia, which has approximately 400 employees.
"As I've said to the staff here, my job is to work for them," Feldman told the Art Newspaper. "It's to help them pull out their dreams, ideas, and creativity, and then raise the money to support them and get them the resources they need to do that. In my experience, it takes two to three years before the institution starts feeling different."
Feldman is also on Twitter at @kaywinfeldman.
