The Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) in New York has chosen its longtime chief curator of drawings and prints, Christophe Cherix, because the establishment’s subsequent director. He’ll take the reins from Glenn Lowry, who has led the museum since 1995, in September.
“I’ve been privileged to work with Christophe for greater than 15 years at MoMA, and I’m delighted that the board has chosen him to be the subsequent director of the museum,” Lowry mentioned in a press release. “Within the months forward, we’ll work collectively to make sure a easy and profitable transition. Christophe is a gifted and proficient curator, and I stay up for seeing the museum evolve and thrive below his in a position path.”
The choice of Cherix to succeed Lowry was permitted unanimously by MoMA’s board of trustees. “Christophe’s sensible curatorial management in trendy and modern artwork, deep perception and fervour for MoMA’s assortment and repute for regular stewardship stood out as indispensable qualities to satisfy the second because the museum’s subsequent director,” Marie-Josée Kravis, the board’s chair, mentioned in a press release.
Cherix, who was born in Switzerland, has labored at MoMA since 2007, when he got here to New York from the Musée d’Artwork et d’Histoire in Geneva, the place he had been a curator of prints. In 2010, he grew to become the chief curator of MoMA’s division of prints and illustrated books. In 2013, when that division merged with the division of drawings, he grew to become the chief curator of drawings and prints, the function he has held since then.
Throughout this time, Cherix organised many common and critically acclaimed exhibitions at MoMA, together with final yr’s Ed Ruscha retrospective and the museum’s 2018 Adrian Piper retrospective (co-curated with Connie Butler and David Platzker), and co-curated solo exhibitions dedicated to Betye Saar (in 2019, with Esther Adler), Marcel Broodthaers (in 2016, with Manuel Borja-Villel), Yoko Ono (in 2015, with Klaus Biesenbach) and Jasper Johns (in 2014, with Ann Temkin).
“MoMA has lengthy been a pacesetter in embracing new types of expression, amplifying the voices of artists from across the globe, and fascinating the broadest audiences onsite and on-line,” Cherix mentioned in a press release. “Because the museum approaches its centennial, my highest precedence is to assist its distinctive employees and be sure that their distinctive skill to navigate the ever-evolving current continues to thrive.”
MoMA’s footprint has expanded enormously since Lowry took the helm 30 years in the past. 4 years into his tenure, the museum introduced plans to merge with the PS1 Middle for Modern Artwork in Lengthy Island Metropolis, Queens, deepening its connections to the contemporary-art world. He then oversaw a serious enlargement of MoMA’s house in Midtown onto an adjoining plot of land. That venture, which required the museum to relocate its public programming to a brief venue in Queens whereas its campus was gutted and scaled up, kicked off in 2001 and was accomplished in 2004, coinciding with the museum’s seventy fifth anniversary.
Only a few years later, MoMA’s management was eyeing a parcel of land next-door and a few house freed up by the closure of the American Folks Artwork Museum’s neighbouring constructing, which MoMA in the end demolished. The following enlargement into the decrease ranges of a brand new skyscraper price $450m and added one other 102,000 sq. ft of house to the museum when it reopened within the autumn of 2019.
Along with its increasing footprint, MoMA’s coffers have grown throughout Lowry’s tenure: the museum’s endowment has gone from round $200m in 1995 to $1.7bn right this moment; and its annual working finances has greater than doubled in that point, from round $80m to round $190m.
Lowry’s tenure has been marked by sporadic tensions and scandals, too. These have included sometimes-tense contract negotiations with the museum’s unionised staff; one such bargaining deadlock led staff to go on strike for a number of months in 2000. Kravis’s predecessor as MoMA board chair, Leon Black, got here below hearth for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein; after Black opted to not search re-election as board chair, he was accused of rape in a number of lawsuits. (Black nonetheless serves as a trustee of the museum.) Kravis’s appointment as Black’s successor has additionally prompted a collection of protests on account of her and her husband’s investments within the oil and fuel trade.
