The Museum of Fashionable 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 stated in an announcement. “Within the months forward, we’ll work collectively to make sure a clean and profitable transition. Christophe is a gifted and gifted curator, and I look ahead to seeing the museum evolve and thrive beneath his ready course.”
The choice of Cherix to succeed Lowry was authorised unanimously by MoMA’s board of trustees. “Christophe’s sensible curatorial management in fashionable and modern artwork, deep perception and keenness for MoMA’s assortment and status for regular stewardship stood out as indispensable qualities to fulfill the second because the museum’s subsequent director,” Marie-Josée Kravis, the board’s chair, stated in an announcement.
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 widespread 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 stated in an announcement. “Because the museum approaches its centennial, my highest precedence is to assist its distinctive workers and be certain that their distinctive potential 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 Up to date 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 area freed up by the closure of the American People 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 area 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 now; and its annual working funds 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 employees to go on strike for a number of months in 2000. Kravis’s predecessor as MoMA board chair, Leon Black, got here beneath 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 resulting from her and her husband’s investments within the oil and gasoline trade.
