Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA) Director Glenn D. Lowry has introduced that he’ll step down from his publish in 2025, bookending three many years on the establishment’s helm. The later years of his tenure have been marked by union actions in addition to protests concentrating on numerous museum board members’ investments in mass incarceration, oil and gasoline extraction, and navy weapons manufacturing.
Lowry assumed the director function at MoMA in 1995 after 5 years because the director of the Artwork Gallery of Ontario. Shortly thereafter, Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s was chosen to design the key enlargement to restructure and double the exhibition area on the 53rd Avenue establishment, which broke floor in 2001 and was accomplished in late 2004. In 1999, Lowry and Alanna Heiss, founding father of the PS1 Modern Artwork Middle in Lengthy Island Metropolis, fostered a merger settlement that preserved the Queens area, renamed to MoMA PS1 in 2010 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the collaboration.
Regardless of its profitable swell and a second enlargement accomplished in 2019, the museum has drawn controversy below Lowry’s management. Following stalled negotiations for union contracts, some workers mounted museum pickets, walkouts, and protests to coincide with high-profile occasions in 2015 and 2018. Throughout a post-quarantine rebound effort in 2022, the museum provided staff unionized below IUOE Native 30 job safety in change for skipping wage or wage will increase for 2 years. Many of those identical staff had simply forgone contracted raises for 2020 and 2021 in gentle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Past labor disputes, the museum has additionally been the location of a number of demonstrations led by teams together with Decolonize This Place (DTP) and MoMA Divest, which aimed to attract consideration to the museum’s sources of funding. Board member and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was the topic of a number of MoMA actions calling out his connection to the Trump administration in addition to his investments in non-public jail firms and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Activists have additionally known as for hedge fund supervisor Steven Tananbaum to be eliminated as a MoMA trustee for profiting off the Puerto Rico debt disaster.
Strike MoMA was some of the notable protest efforts concentrating on the “poisonous philanthropy” exhibited by the museum’s board and trustees. The 10-week activism marketing campaign in 2021 zeroed in on Leon D. Black, then-board chairman and former CEO of Apollo World Administration, for his connection to convicted intercourse offender and baby intercourse trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The motion additionally focused Fink, Tananbaum, Ronald Lauder, Glenn Dubin, and Steven Cohen amongst others for involvement in capitalist ventures related to mass incarceration, environmental destruction, and military-grade weapons manufacturing.
All through the weeks-long protests, Strike MoMA known as Lowry a “gaslighter-in-chief” after he denied that museum safety behaved violently whereas attempting to forestall protesters from getting into MoMA in a staff-wide e-mail leaked to Hyperallergic. Lowry mentioned that “any bodily contact that occurred on Friday was the results of protesters’ actions,” asserting that “at no time did a safety officer assault a protester.”
Black stepped down from his chairman function in March 2021, however he stays on the museum’s board. He was succeeded as chairman by present Chair Marie-Josée Kravis, who has additionally drawn immense criticism in addition to requires removing from the board for her and her husband Henry’s non-public fairness agency that has invested billions into the fossil gas trade, in addition to their donations to the Trump administration. In September 2023, 16 local weather activists have been arrested on the MoMA for trying to stage an in a single day protest calling on the museum to “Drop Kravis.”
In early 2024, after some 800 protesters managed to close down the museum for a peaceable, arrest-free protest for Palestine that focused Kravis and different board members, MoMA discovered itself on the heart of controversy weeks later when a customer was initially denied entry for having a keffiyeh of their bag. In an announcement to Hyperallergic, the museum apologized and clarified that safety had misidentified the headscarf it as a drop-down banner.
In keeping with an official assertion from the museum, Lowry will ship the Chaire de Louvre lectures on the Louvre Museum in Paris within the fall of 2025. The board will quickly start a world seek for a succeeding director for the museum.