The Abridged version:
- Crocker Art Museum’s new CEO, Agustín Arteaga, arrived in Sacramento following a global career that included leadership roles in Mexico, Argentina and Texas.
- “I want people everywhere to think: This is a place I want to visit,” Arteaga said.
- Arteaga secured a Frida Kahlo painting on exhibit for the first time in the Crocker’s history.
Many visitors entering the Crocker Art Museum today head in the same direction and look as if they are searching for a family member they’ve never met in person. They walk through the front door and into a softly lit gallery to get a glimpse of a rarely seen work now hanging inside the museum walls. It’s a first for the Crocker — and for the record crowds flocking to find Frida.
Frida in Sacramento, emotion and history intertwined
Bringing a Frida Kahlo painting to Sacramento required persistence, intention and the personal connections of the museum’s new leader. “Self-Portrait with Loose Hair” is a striking work that enriches the exhibition and gives Sacramento something it has never had before: An original Frida Kahlo painting on its walls. The painting is on loan to the Crocker from a private collection through May 3, 2026. It is part of the exhibit Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms, bringing together more than 70 works from more than two centuries of Crocker acquisition.
“If you talk about feminism, the most iconic figure of that movement is Frida Kahlo. Very few museums in the world have a Frida,” said Agustín Arteaga, Ph.D., the new Mort and Marcy Friedman Director and CEO of the Crocker Art Museum.
Arteaga, who started his new role leading the Crocker on July 1, said Frida’s arrival in Sacramento holds historical significance.
“The first time Frida traveled outside Mexico City, she came to San Francisco,” he said. “It was exactly 95 years ago, almost to the day we opened this show.”
In the gallery, he watches visitors respond with awe, empathy and deep reflection.
“She represents qualities we hope to embody: Strength, resilience, vulnerability,” he said. “There is something living in her eyes. It is as if she speaks to you.”
The excitement around Frida’s arrival comes at the same moment the Crocker has a new director for the first time in 25 years. Together, these two milestones signal a meaningful shift for California’s oldest art museum.
A global leader with a local heart
Arteaga comes to the Crocker with an extensive international background, but speaks first about the local community. He describes art not as a collection of objects, but as a living language.
“What art has taught me,” he said, “is that at the end, we all belong together. Art reflects what we are, our emotions, our histories, our contradictions.”
Arteaga said one of the reasons he was drawn to Sacramento was the city’s extraordinary diversity — and the opportunity that diversity creates for a museum.
“I have been surprised by how diverse Sacramento is,” he said. “I read information from the census, but not until you are here do you realize how diverse our community is.”
Arteaga calls the city’s diversity “beautiful and exciting.” For him, Sacramento’s diversity was not simply a fact. It was an invitation.
Arteaga arrived in Sacramento with more than 30 years of museum leadership on three continents. Before coming to the Crocker, he served as director of the Dallas Museum of Art, one of the country’s largest art museums, where he expanded community access, strengthened international partnerships and elevated the museum’s national profile.
His career also includes leading the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City and serving as the founding director of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Though based primarily in the Americas, Arteaga’s projects have taken him across Europe, where he has cultivated partnerships with leading museums and scholars in Spain, France, Italy and beyond. That global perspective shapes every choice he makes.
Arteaga said he came to Sacramento because he saw a city ready to step onto a larger cultural stage.
“It is a space where wonder leads you to want to learn more about yourself and about the world,” he said. “And the Crocker deserves to be better known — not only in Sacramento, but throughout the world.”
Agustin talks about the “magic” of the Crocker museum, the feeling of stepping between centuries as one moves from the contemporary wing to the Victorian mansion.
“You are transported,” he said. “You feel the moment those works were created.”
How Arteaga was picked for the job. ‘It took a year to get him here’
Finding someone to follow the Crocker’s longtime director, Lial Jones, took vision and patience.
“It is always incredibly difficult to replace a founder,” said Board President Garry Maisel, who led the global search. “Lial is the founder of the modern Crocker. While the museum existed before her, it was not the Crocker of today.”
For more than two decades, Jones shaped the Crocker into the institution Sacramento knows today before her retirement at the end of 2024. Under her leadership, the museum completed its transformative expansion, broadened its collections, strengthened its role in arts education and became a cultural anchor for the region.
As applications arrived from around the world, Arteaga stood out.
“He championed accessibility. He championed diverse programming. And he championed community involvement,” Maisel said. “Those qualities matched exactly where we want the Crocker to go.”
The matriarch Marcy Friedman
For decades, Marcy Friedman has been one of the Crocker’s most consistent forces — a philanthropic leader, long-time board member and key figure in shaping both the museum’s modern expansion and its cultural identity. Her fingerprints are everywhere at the Crocker, from governance to collections, community outreach and donor engagement. Friedman is among the top donors to the Crocker Art Museum of all time. Arteaga’s title — Mort and Marcy Friedman Director and CEO — bears her and her late husband’s names — forever.
“We need to aspire to have an institution that fulfills its mission, to share the creative talent we have in California across all cultures and to display it well,” she said.
Friedman has long emphasized growing the museum’s collection and footprint. She noted that in recent years the Crocker has substantially expanded its acquisitions by artists from a wide range of cultural backgrounds.
Her belief in embracing diverse cultures, telling deeper stories and elevating California’s creative talent has become part of the Crocker’s DNA. Friedman has been working on plans for a new Crocker sculpture park and garden, personally donating the largest amount of money needed to pay for the proposed park to date.
Friedman was committed to finding a leader who instinctively understood Sacramento’s diversity. Her early impressions of the new director confirm her confidence in the board’s choice.
“He is unafraid to make suggestions,” she said. “I think he is going to be wonderful.”
A historic European exhibition and a glimpse of the Crocker’s future
In his first months, Arteaga’s global relationships are already reshaping the exhibition calendar in early 2026. A major European exhibition touring leading American museums became available when another institution withdrew. The curators contacted the Crocker directly because of Arteaga’s reputation.
Starting next February, The Sense of Beauty: Six Centuries of Painting from Museo de Arte de Ponce, will bring some of the world’s most celebrated art to Sacramento. The exhibit will run through May 24, 2026.
The show features more than six centuries of paintings from Puerto Rico’s premiere museum, including masterworks by Rubens, van Dyck, Vigée-LeBrun, Courbet and John Singer Sargent. Visitors will also see rarely-shown Spanish works by El Greco and Goya, alongside pieces by Puerto Rican artists like José Campeche y Jordán and Enoc Perez.
At the center of it all: Sir Frederic Leighton’s famous Flaming June, a painting so iconic it rarely leaves Ponce.
Friedman says the exhibition is an “extraordinary opportunity for Sacramento to experience a global collection that spans continents and cultures.”
“That opportunity would not have happened without Agustín’s national credentials,” Maisel said.
It is the kind of exhibition Sacramento has never received in the past. Now, it may become far more common.
Belonging and understanding, the Crocker’s deepest purpose
In speaking about the purpose of art, Arteaga said he believes art provides the “opportunity for common ground.”
“I wish we all could be more thoughtful about each other,” he said. “If we take time to learn about the other, we improve our lives and our understanding of one another.”
Maisel agrees.
“Art represents life, beautiful, ugly, challenging, heartwarming,” he said. “The Crocker prepares us to engage with all of it.”
Friedman adds a parallel perspective, rooted in years of leadership.
“This has always been about building an institution for the public,” she said.
Looking forward, a city and a museum rising together
Arteaga and his husband, Carlos Gonzalez-Jaime, see Sacramento with fresh eyes, and that perspective excites them.
“This is a blooming city,” Arteaga said. “Creative, transformative, thriving.”
He looks forward to biking to work from their new home in West Sacramento.
Even as the Crocker gains momentum, Maisel is straightforward about the realities ahead.
“Government funding for the arts has dwindled to almost nothing,” he said. “For the Crocker to survive, the community needs to step up.”
Yet what the museum gives back feels immeasurable: Connection, discovery and moments that stay with people long after they leave.
Arteaga believes more success will come when Sacramento sees the Crocker in a new way — and when the wider world begins to see Sacramento as a cultural destination.
“I want people everywhere to think: This is a place I want to visit,” he said.
Visitors may continue to ask where Frida is. But what they find — a museum that reflects them, challenges them and welcomes them — will likely define the Crocker’s future far more than any single exhibition. Even Frida.
Rob Stewart is an executive producer and reporter for Abridged.