Palm Springs Art Museum

"This IS when I started leaving the smile behind. I felt calmer and I didn't feel the need to have all my models looking at me and blasting you with a histrionic expression." D.J. Hall is talking about "Reflection," her 2001 painting of fellow artist Candice Gawne. Neither blond nor giddy, like Hall's signature subjects, Gawne is seen in profile as if lost in thought over an afternoon cocktail.

"The advantage of not being able to produce art is that you can spend all your energy looking at art," said Don Rubell, whose family of self-confessed contemporary art fanatics is perpetually in search of the next addition to its 5,000-piece collection. Pleased to have uttered a complete sentence without being interrupted by Mera, his wife and collecting partner of nearly 45 years, he eased into a knowing smile as she jumped in to explain how their collecting obsession works.

Steven Nash, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas since 2001, has been appointed executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum. A veteran curator and administrator who has organized dozens of exhibitions and has been second in command at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Nash will assume his new position in April. He will succeed retiring director Janice Lyle, who has led the Palm Springs museum for 12 years. * -- Suzanne Muchnic

AS the architect of the Palm Springs Art Museum, Frank Sinatra's desert house and the mountaintop station of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, E. Stewart Williams helped shape the look of that city. "He was an early environmentalist with his own spin on desert Modernism," says Michael Stern of the Palm Springs Modern Committee, a nonprofit preservation group that will honor Williams at 2 p.m. on Friday with a star on the city's Walk of Stars.

Jeremy Strick, who led Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art during a nine-year period of vibrant programming and critical acclaim but resigned in December amid a financial crisis that threatened the institution's survival, has been appointed director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

I enjoyed reading J.R. Moehringer's appreciation of the Frank Sinatra house ("'The House I Lived In,'" The Travel Issue, March 26). However, I was disappointed that he did not include the name of the architect who designed the building, E. Stewart Williams. All too often design is taken for granted, as if it just happened by itself, as if it sprouted from the ground or grew on a tree. Williams is featured in the documentary film "Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs," which premiered at the Palm Springs Art Museum a few weeks ago. Bill Stern Executive Director Museum of California Design Los Angeles