One of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s senior curators, Claire Schneider, has been laid off. It’s a fairly significant loss for the museum, brought on by the continuing budget cuts that have already severely lowered the organization’s exhibition fund.

Sources in the museum say its new director, Tim Rodgers, was presented with the fait accompli of having to lose a senior position in the organization when he took the job late last year. (Director is the museum’s top position; Rodgers came from the Santa Fe Museum of Art.)

Schneider was for ten years a curator at the Albright-Knox, a contemporary art museum in Buffalo. She was brought to SMOCA in 2008 by longtime director Susan Krane, who a few months later left for San Jose. The museum had been without a director for a year, ending with the appointment of Rodgers in November.

Schneider, like many museum leaders, had been frustrated with the ever-contracting attention museums were getting from the mainstream press. She’d lately organized a periodic meeting between local curators and local writers and editors, PHXated among them, to discuss how local art institutions should attack that problem head on.

An Arizona Republic story on Schneider’s arrival in town here.

Her departure comes at a time of no little chaos in the Scottsdale city arts infrastructure of which SMOCA is a part. The museum, the performing arts center and a public art organization all exist under the umbrella of the city’s cultural council. The cultural center’s artistic director left after being on the job less than a year last month; a few weeks later, four of the cultural council’s board of trustees resigned en masse.