Holly Block

Holly Block, the director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and a longtime cultural force in New York, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 58. Her partner, Dana Emmott, said the cause was breast cancer. As an arts administrator Ms. Block moved just outside the white-hot center of the New York art world, where the city’s alternative spaces and smaller museums overlap and cross-fertilize and personal determination and vision can have a big impact. Possessing both qualities, Ms. Block transformed the two institutions she served as director — Art in General, an alternative space then in TriBeCa, and the Bronx Museum — reshaping and expanding their local and international profiles. Ms. Block was born on Dec. 24, 1958, in Princeton, N.J. Arriving on Christmas Eve, she was named for the holiday’s traditional greenery. Her father, A. Harvey Block, was an experimental psychologist; her mother, the former Cielle Fink, was assistant dean of the school of higher education at the Catholic University of America in Washington. Ms. Block graduated from Georgetown Day School in Washington and attended Bennington College in Vermont, earning a bachelor’s degree in photography and sculpture in 1980. She briefly studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. She joined the Bronx Museum in 1985, becoming curator of off-site galleries and starting a museum program to make art more accessible to the public. Ms. Block became director of Art in General in 1988. Ms. Block returned to the Bronx Museum as director in 2006. Ms. Block’s marriage to John Morton ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Emmott, she is survived by her brother, Eben; her stepmother, Margaret Almazan; and her half brother, Charles Block-Almazan.