Jeremy Strick, who as director of the Nasher Sculpture Center for almost 15 of its 20 years conceived the Nasher Prize and guided the museum through the years-long controversy of the glare cast by its next-door neighbor, announced Thursday that he will retire on June 1.

Strick, 68, has worked in the arts for 40 years, during which he also served as director of the elite Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA, in his native Los Angeles, from 1999 to 2008, when he moved to Dallas. Strick said for the moment he and his wife, Wendy, intend to stay.

“We have no plans to move at this point,” Strick said. “We love Dallas. We have lots of friends here, and there’s work to be done here. I don’t have a timeline, but we’re planning to stay for at least the foreseeable future.”

Strick chose not to elaborate on “work to be done here,” saying that “over the years, I’ve kept an informal list of projects I’d like to engage in, on what I’d like to begin as the next phase of my career, when I am still most capable of doing so. But nothing to announce at this point.”

Strick and his wife have a daughter in Washington, D.C., and a son in Los Angeles, with whom they hope to spend more time. Strick grew up as the son of Joseph Strick, a Hollywood director and producer, who won an Academy Award in 1971 in the category of “Best Documentary, Short Subjects,” for his landmark film Interviews with My Lai Veterans.

Strick has applied the same spirit of creativity to his tenure in Dallas, having conceived the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, which gave out its first $100,000 award in 2016 to Colombian artist-activist Doris Salcedo, the first of eight recipients. No other international prize cites culture specifically.

Among those praising Strick for his work with the prize was Sir Nicholas Serota, a Nasher Prize juror, who is also a former director of the Tate and current chair of the Arts Council England.

“As Jeremy intended,” Serota said in a statement, “the Nasher Prize has transformed public appreciation of the capacity of contemporary sculpture to raise questions about some of the big issues of our time and has quickly established itself as an award that generates international attention.”

When it comes to high points during his time as director, Strick said, “There are so many. But there are two moments in particular that I would note. Because I see them as inflection points for the institution.”

In addition to the prize, Strick cited Nasher Xchange, an innovative public showcase that began in 2014 in celebration of the museum’s 10th anniversary. Created as a way of exporting the museum’s gifts beyond its walls and into underserved communities all over Dallas, it elevated the work of 10 contemporary artists, among them Rick Lowe, Vicki Meek and Ruben Ochoa.

“Through the communities we worked with and the partners we worked with, by extending our physical reach, I think that we, to some degree, changed or influenced the perception of the Nasher,” Strick said.

One of those artists, Meek, called Strick “a visionary” for that and other reasons.

“I started a relationship with the Nasher because of Jeremy, when he invited me to be a part of Nasher Xchange. And I really was grateful, because most of these people here didn’t realize I was a practicing artist. Jeremy is really who opened up the Nasher to the community.

“He really does have very visionary ideas around what museums can be, should be and all of that. I hate that he’s leaving, but at the same time, I understand it.”

Under Strick, the Nasher also rolled out Nasher Windows, a program designed to make lemonade out of lemons by offering access to art even when the museum was closed during the pandemic. It featured work by 11 early- to mid-career artists “in a glass-enclosed vestibule for the outside world to see.” Nasher Windows morphed into Nasher Public, which takes place both at the Nasher and off site in venues around the city.

Since the fall of 2020, 23 artists and two art collectives have participated in Nasher Public, including Meek, whose public project “Urban Historical Reclamation and Recognition” assembled a collective of local artists and historians to document and memorialize a community within Dallas, the Tenth Street Historic Freedman’s Town in Oak Cliff.

Not everything under Strick’s watch is, however, a happy memory. On Sept. 26, 2011, Nasher employees began to notice a white-hot glare emanating from the highly reflective glass being applied to the exterior of The Museum Tower, then under construction next door.

Thus began a gargantuan controversy that has never been resolved. As Strick said, on sunny days, the walls of the Nasher look as though they have been inundated with hot bright spots. And in the early years of The Glare, the effects were alarmingly evident on the parched landscape of the museum’s outdoor garden.

From a municipal standpoint, however, The Glare shined a spotlight on the owners of Museum Tower, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System, whose then-director was toppled and whose financial problems — fueled largely by high-end investments in luxury real estate all over the world — led to this:

As The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this week, “With one year to go before Dallas officials have to prove to the state that they have a new plan to close a multi-billion dollar funding gap for the police and fire pension system, the city still doesn’t have a blueprint on how to get there.”

Colleagues have long appreciated Strick for his sense of humor. Asked for his reflections on The Glare, he once replied with a laugh: “No pun intended?”

Strick called its 12-year history an “odd and complicated situation … in which a very specific problem had all kinds of implications, all kinds of fallout.”

Mary McDermott Cook, the daughter of the late Margaret McDermott, one of the most generous philanthropists in the city’s history, said that “when Jeremy came, the Nasher was a beautiful building next to the Dallas Museum of Art, that some people in Dallas knew about, but not a whole lot.” She saluted Strick most of all for his creation of the Nasher Prize, which she said has done nothing less “than take a small, significant museum and make it a museum of international stature.”

The Nasher has yet to hire Strick’s successor, nor has it settled on a timeline for when it might do so.