Glenn Lowry, the director of New York’s Museum of Trendy Artwork, will step down from his put up in 2025, bringing to an in depth a 30-year tenure that can have made him the longest-serving chief within the establishment’s historical past.
He has held the highest put up since 1995. When it was revealed in 2018 that he deliberate to proceed by means of 2025, the museum parted with certainly one of its cardinal guidelines: that “chief curators and different senior managers” retire at age 65. The coverage, a MoMA spokesperson stated on the time, “doesn’t provide sufficient flexibility to strategically recruit and retain a gifted and skilled work power.”
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Lowry, who’s now 69, has already gone previous that restrict. When he retires in September 2025, he will probably be pushing 70.
“It’s the precise second to consider the way forward for the museum and I simply thought, carpe diem,” Lowry instructed the New York Instances, which first reported the information. “All of the issues I got down to do 30 years in the past are both achieved or in play in a really constructive manner.”
And, he instructed the Instances, “I didn’t need to be the one who stayed too lengthy.”
In accordance with Marie-Josée Kravis, the museum’s chairman, Lowry’s determination to depart was made “by mutual settlement.” His contract “might have been renewed,” Kravis stated, and there was speak within the New York artwork world that Lowry would stay on by means of 2029. These rumors have now been confirmed unfaithful, and the highest spot on the nation’s foremost fashionable artwork museum will quickly be open to somebody new.
Beneath Lowry’s management, MoMA has been by means of plenty of main shifts, together with two renovations and one enlargement. That enlargement, which elevated MoMA to 708,000 sq. toes in 2019, coincided with an influential assortment rehang that diversified the galleries and broke down limitations between disciplines like artwork, structure, dance, and movie.
Initially, Lowry confronted controversy for his makes an attempt to increase the museum in 2014, a plan that referred to as for the demolition of the American People Artwork Museum. MoMA ended up doing simply that, a lot to the dismay of many structure critics, however not earlier than altering its plans for the way it might accomplish that.
Lots of Lowry’s efforts to assist MoMA develop have been profitable. In 1999 he merged PS1, a recent artwork area in a former Lengthy Island Metropolis college, with MoMA. Throughout his tenure, attendance has elevated as properly.
When he joined MoMA in 1995, Lowry, then 40 years previous, had already directed one different establishment, the Artwork Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. He was additionally a scholar of Islamic artwork.
The enjoyment surrounding MoMA’s 2019 rehang was short-lived, as the next 12 months, barely two months in, the museum, like all others world wide, shuttered because of the pandemic. Budgets had been slashed, and staff had been laid off. However by 2023, it appeared that MoMA had bounced again, reporting to the Artwork Newspaper that it had welcomed 10 % extra guests in 2022 than it had in 2019, throughout which it was closed for a number of months.
In more moderen years, there was scrutiny over sure MoMA board members, most notably Leon Black, who introduced plans to step down as board chair in 2021 amid reviews on his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Black—who has additionally since been accused of rape, allegations that he has denied—stays a board member on the museum. There have additionally been protests by MoMA staff over the wages they obtain.
Just lately, the museum has mounted retrospectives for Joan Jonas, Wolfgang Tillmans, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, with a Thomas Schütte survey on account of open later this month. Its exhibition program has just lately proven a willingness to exhibit of much less usually seen sides of the gathering, with one huge video artwork presentation earlier this 12 months changing into the biggest exhibition present dedicated to that medium ever staged in MoMA’s historical past.