MoMA Director Glenn Lowry to Depart in 2025 After 30 Years on the Helm

Glenn Lowry, the director of New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork, will step down from his submit 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 submit since 1995. When it was revealed in 2018 that he deliberate to proceed by 2025, the museum parted with one in every 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 proficient and skilled work drive.”

Lowry, who’s now 69, has already gone previous that restrict. When he retires in September 2025, he shall be pushing 70.

“It’s the correct second to consider the way forward for the museum and I simply thought, carpe diem,” Lowry informed the New York Occasions, which first reported the information. “All of the issues I got down to do 30 years in the past are both completed or in play in a really optimistic approach.”

And, he informed the Occasions, “I didn’t wish 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 discuss within the New York artwork world that Lowry would stay on by 2029. These rumors have now been confirmed unfaithful, and the highest spot on the nation’s foremost trendy artwork museum will quickly be open to somebody new.

Below Lowry’s management, MoMA has been by a variety of main shifts, together with two renovations and one growth. That growth, which elevated MoMA to 708,000 sq. ft in 2019, coincided with an influential assortment rehang that diversified the galleries and broke down obstacles 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 Folks 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 could accomplish that.

A lot of Lowry’s efforts to assist MoMA develop have been profitable. In 1999 he merged PS1, a up to date 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 yr, 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 p.c extra guests in 2022 than it had in 2019, throughout which it was closed for a number of months.

In newer 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.

Not too long ago, the museum has mounted retrospectives for Joan Jonas, Wolfgang Tillmans, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, with a Thomas Schütte survey as a result of open later this month. Its exhibition program has just lately proven a willingness to exhibit sides of the gathering which can be much less usually seen, with one huge video artwork presentation earlier this yr changing into the most important exhibition present dedicated to that medium ever staged in MoMA’s historical past.