10 Sep MoMA's Longtime Director Glenn Lowry to Leave in 2025

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/momas-longtime-director-glenn-lowry-to-leave/

‘It’s the right moment to think about the future of the museum and I just thought, carpe diem,’ Lowry told The New York Times.

Glenn Lowry, the long-time director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), will leave his influential post at America’s first institution dedicated to modern art in September 2025.

Appointed in 1994, Lowry led the museum through significant changes, including a merger with Queens-based contemporary art space MoMA PS1 in 2000, expansions that more than doubled gallery sizes, and an endowment increase from $200 million to $1.7 billion.

His contract could have been renewed for another five years, Marie-Josée Kravis, the chair of the museum’s board, told The New York Times. Lowry, who turns 70 this month, opted out, leaving ‘by mutual agreement’.

‘It’s the right moment to think about the future of the museum and I just thought, carpe diem,’ Lowry told The Times, noting ‘a sea change both in terms of race, ethnicity and age’ since the start of his appointment.

View from the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby looking out onto the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. © 2023 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Noah Kalina.

Lowry was previously the director at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where he oversaw a 100,000 square-foot expansion, managed significant public funding cuts, and generated unprecedented interest in the museum’s exhibition programme.

At MoMA, he was tasked with raising over $100 million to support the museum’s endowment, finding a building in Manhattan to house its growing contemporary art collection, and sustaining morale amid low-paid museum employees post-union negotiations and protests.

Lowry led controversial projects such as the demolition of the American Folk Art Museum between 2001 and 2004 onto whose site MoMA expanded. He diversified the museum’s curatorial departments to include media and performance, initiated research initiatives into contemporary art practice, and conceived a fellowship programme with Studio Museum in Harlem for emerging artists alongside Thelma Golden—one of many names speculated to replace Lowry.

‘All the things I set out to do 30 years ago are either accomplished or in play in a very positive way,’ he told The Times. His plans post-MoMA include a lecture series next autumn at Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Museum of Modern Art recently held exhibitions for Joan Jonas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Wolfgang Tillmans. A survey of work by German artist Thomas Schütte will open later this month. —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/momas-longtime-director-glenn-lowry-to-leave/