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The artists had come: the veterans such as Cindy Sherman and Marina Abramovic, the breakout photographer Lotus L. Kang, the always-on-brand sculptor known as KAWS. The donors had come: the former mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the young new board president Sarah Arison, and a whole clutch of Tisches and Rockefellers.
It was early June, one of those rare New York evenings where the sun still dazzles but the humidity has not yet saturated your tux or gown, and in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, the city’s art world — or at least its most tax-advantaged stratum — was gossiping about a market slowdown, exchanging plans for Basel and voicing relief at a recent leadership succession.
Most years, MoMA’s annual Party in the Garden honors several artists and philanthropists who have made a difference to the museum. (The more honorees, the more tables they can guilt their friends into buying.) This June had only one: Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s outgoing director, who had overseen two major expansions of this building on West 53rd Street and everything that took place inside it. The man who had cajoled checks from these diners for 30 years was now the evening’s laureate — and Lowry, 70, kitted out in a floral scarf and one of his signature Nehru-collar jackets, grew emotional as a constellation of artists lauded his career.
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“It feels very strange to be on the other side of the equation,” Lowry told the guests in an acknowledgment speech that was also a farewell address. He offered tributes to his board leaders past and present. Jocular, heartfelt recognition of his assistants, all thanked by name. And then, at the end, he took an unexpected turn from the celebratory, and offered a stark look at the future of American cultural institutions.
“Museums exist in the real world,” he told the diners, many of whom had paid $3,000 a plate. “They are willful efforts to imagine the world, through objects and programs that reflect their beliefs and commitments. In the months and years ahead, we will have choices to make that are consequential, perhaps more so than at any other time since the Second World War.”
The upheavals from Washington were coming for MoMA — if not yet directly, as the Smithsonian Institution or Harvard University had already experienced, then certainly ambiently, as the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement dissuaded international visitors. “If we believe in a museum that celebrates the values of pluralism, that honors freedom of expression, and protects minority rights and dissent,” Lowry went on, “then we will have to actively defend our values. If we want a museum that will collect and display the most daring and challenging artists of our time, then we will have to fight for that. If we want a museum that is a home for artists, scholars, curators and visitors from around the world, then we will have to speak out loudly for that.”
His admonitory farewell may have caught some listeners off guard. Lowry, after all, had a reputation as MoMA’s cool operator, unruffled but also unromantic. Early staff turnover, strained labor relations and two very expensive capital projects cemented an impression of an energetic, growth-oriented C.E.O., far from the tweedy scholasticism of its founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. A period of populist programming — you may recall the hourslong queues to enter the precipitative selfie booth known as the “Rain Room” — earned him a rebuke, in these pages in 2014, from MoMA’s philanthropic powerhouse Agnes Gund: “There are a number of us on the board who don’t want to see the museum become a mere entertainment center.”
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What a difference a decade makes. Lowry stepped down this week after 30 years as the leader of what has remained, on his watch, the most important institution of 20th- and 21st-century art anywhere in the world. It may not be the most innovative modern art museum (that would be the Museo Reina Sofía, in Madrid), nor its best attended (Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris see more traffic, while M+ in Hong Kong is nipping at its heels). But it has become nimbler, worldlier, more outspoken and perhaps smarter than ever — and when its newest facility opened in 2019, critics who once counted MoMA out showered the twice-reborn museum with nearly universal acclaim.
The Lowry era of the Museum of Modern Art now reads, almost too perfectly, as a three-act drama: promise, distress, redemption. The truth is not that neat, as nothing is over 30 years. There were great successes in the wilderness years (I’m thinking of the wonderful, revisionist “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925,” staged by Leah Dickerman in 2012, or the rambunctious Sigmar Polke retrospective of 2014). There remains enduring doubt, despite its refreshed curatorial voice, whether it can sculpt a shapeless current generation into an intelligible next chapter in modern art. But MoMA, having endured years of criticism of its facilities, its exhibitions and its corporate airs, looks today like the wisest and stablest institution in town. The question, as Lowry warned in that last gala speech, now becomes whether they can keep it going — which has as much to do with the world outside 53rd Street as the pictures within.
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“WHEN I WAS a graduate student — so that’s late 1970s — nobody was going to museums to look at modern art,” Lowry said to me as we set into lunch at the Modern, the restaurant with two Michelin stars along the sculpture garden’s south edge. (Among the many perks of being MoMA director: the restaurant lets him order from the casual bar menu while sitting in the formal garden dining room.) And Lowry himself does not come from a modernist background: He is a scholar of Islamic art, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the 16th-century tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun in Delhi. For six years he worked as a curator at what’s now the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington; then he moved to Toronto, where he salvaged a troubled expansion of the Art Gallery of Ontario in the early 1990s.
Richard Oldenburg, Lowry’s discreet predecessor, announced his retirement in 1993. As this newspaper announced on its front page of Nov. 17, 1994, MoMA’s subsequent “Troubled Search for a Chief” took 14 whole months. Respected leaders of America’s largest museums turned the job down, on the not outlandish grounds that the curators really ran the show and the director’s principal role was to raise funds. Lowry’s historical specialism reassured the Modern’s curators that they would still be in charge of the program, while the trustees were happy to pay above the asking price for a scholar with managerial chops. (Always one of the museum world’s most generously paid executives, Lowry was revealed in 2007 to have received $5.35 million in additional compensation from a purpose-built trust funded by David Rockefeller and other board members.)
He was just 40 when he arrived, and his first years coincided with an explosion in public interest in contemporary art, “for a whole range of good and bad reasons,” Lowry told me. “Good because it was actually seriously interesting. Bad because it was tied to a dramatic scale-up of the market.” MoMA embraced young artists such as Steve McQueen and Rirkrit Tiravanija, yet at the end of the 1990s the museum still felt behind the times. The momentum in New York was with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — which was mounting blockbusters of Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Giorgio Armani gowns, and planning a giant new facility near the South Street Seaport to complement its titanium satellite in Bilbao, Spain.
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MoMA, in the late 1990s, could have gone the Guggenheim route, shipping its deep collection to far-flung franchises. Instead, Lowry struck a cunning merger with PS1, the hip Queens contemporary art space founded by Alanna Heiss, which gave PS1 financial stability and MoMA an edgier venue with a faster tempo. (The art historian Thomas Crow, in 1999, compared the merger to “Disney absorbing Miramax.”) And MoMA elected, after a highly publicized competition among some of the boldest young names in architecture, to deliver the museum’s built future to Yoshio Taniguchi, an architect of measured refinement who had never built anything outside Japan.
His understated but transformative expansion — the anti-Guggenheim Bilbao, costing $858 million and necessitating a closure of more than two years — opened at the end of 2004, and I have come to admire it more than I did initially. Yes, it lacks the serenity of Taniguchi’s museums in Japan. But when I go today, I still experience moments of true building mastery: especially in the sculpture garden he designed, icily elegant, bracketed by three porches under deep overhangs.
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“There was a critique that the building was too corporate, I was too corporate, it wasn’t intimate and warm,” Lowry remembered. But by expanding north, the 2004 design finally let MoMA’s curators delineate a fuller, wider history of art in “galleries that had multiple entrances that created circuits, rather than enfilades. And there had been very little common space, or public space, in the museum. I was very interested in the idea that somebody who came to the museum was coming for something in addition to just the galleries. Coming to be with other people. For a communal experience.”
Really, the trouble with the 2004 MoMA project was less how it functioned than what it symbolized: a bigger, richer and chillier museum in a city that was becoming all three too. The election of Bloomberg, and the transformation of post-9/11 New York into one of the safest and most expensive cities in America, found a reflection in Taniguchi’s large and dispassionate headquarters — which nodded to the International Style in MoMA’s DNA, but was more expensive and so much more crowded. In 1993, the year Lowry’s predecessor resigned, MoMA’s annual attendance stood at 1.28 million. By 2010 that number was 3 million; today it has settled into a very respectable post-Covid attendance of 2.66 million. (Admission has climbed, too, from $8 when Lowry became director to $30.)
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“We had absolutely no idea that our attendance was going to double,” Lowry said. The increased square footage could barely contain all the new visitors, and it was malapportioned besides: still nowhere near enough collection space, with a flummoxing and oversized central atrium. Taniguchi spoke often about MoMA as “a microcosm of Manhattan,” and he was right in good ways and in bad. His tube of an entrance hall, stretching from 53rd to 54th Street and reliably congested, often recalled nothing so much as a subway underpass.
A Broadway boogie-woogie, indeed. In a new time of digital media and mass tourism, that unlovable atrium became host to cocktail parties, silly concerts and Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present,” a 2010 phenomenon in which visitors waited in an hourslong line to stare down the performance artist — and get their picture taken in the process. (Participants’ photographs were posted to Flickr, a nearly forgotten photo-sharing site, a year before Instagram was even born.)
It may have been the first truly viral art exhibition, and its packed galleries suggested how attention in the time of the smartphone would become a tradable, brandable commodity. “People would come to the museum knowing that they would never sit with Marina, but they would sit with each other, looking at people,” Lowry now remembers. That was one of the things you did at a museum now, along with eating at the Modern and buying your MoMA/Yankees baseball cap.
But in the back of the house, there were shrewder moves taking place. The museum shook up its siloed departments, breaking down the old fiefs of painting, drawing and prints and introducing a new base for media and performance. Lowry’s smartest move may have been the creation of a new job, associate director, for Kathy Halbreich of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, whose arrival solidified a new devotion to contemporary art. “She changed my life,” acknowledged Lowry, who told me he’d thought about moving on from MoMA before her arrival in 2008. “I started to get super jazzed again about the museum.” Together, they launched the most consequential initiative of MoMA’s 21st century: its global research forum, Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), which allied the museum with scholars and curators in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, and transformed its collections and publications into a worldwide project.
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All of this cost money, and behind MoMA’s white walls, bearing the names of its donors in sans serif silver letters, were disputes over cash, ethics and social inequality. Museum workers, never highly paid, went on strike for more than four months in 2000. A multiyear partnership with Volkswagen continued even after the car manufacturer pleaded guilty in the emissions cheating scandal. In 2021, Leon Black voluntarily stepped down as board chairman after scrutiny of his payments to Jeffrey Epstein. “Look,” Lowry parried, “there are built-in inequities and tensions in pretty much any enterprise.” MoMA, unlike several peer institutions, did not lay off any full-time employees during the 2020 pandemic, although it did terminate some freelance contracts. Lowry credited the full retention of his staff to MoMA’s trustees: “I can’t tell you the number of people on our board who can walk through the galleries and know the names of our security officers.”
It was less than a decade after the opening of the Taniguchi facility that MoMA decided it needed to expand again, which would necessitate the destruction of the former home of the American Folk Art Museum next door. The plan turned MoMA, the guardian of modern art and architecture, into a villain of New York’s preservationists, and Diller Scofidio & Renfro’s hasty initial designs (more giant atria, not many more collection galleries) came in for a drubbing. This was followed, shortly after, by the epochal catastrophe of “Björk,” the worst-received show of Lowry’s 30-year tenure, a showcase of the Icelandic pop star as off-key as a Florence Foster Jenkins recital.
Maybe it’s hard to remember, through the fog of just 10 years, just how much ill will accrued to MoMA at the time of the Folk/Björk double debacle. “If we were at the right moment for Marina, we were at the wrong moment for Björk. And timing is everything,” Lowry now says. He recalled traveling with Klaus Biesenbach, the show’s curator, to a board retreat. The two of them decided to be “very honest about why the exhibition didn’t meet our own expectations. And I remember Jerry Speyer, who was chair of the board, said, ‘There’s only one thing to remember. Don’t stop taking risks. You have a board that has’ — I’m going to cry because I think it was really powerful — ‘You have a board that has your back. And the only failure here would be to retreat.’ How many institutions have that?”
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And perhaps it was because of Lowry’s longevity in the top job, rather than despite it, that he was able to lead the museum into a third act. MoMA scrapped the architects’ initial redesigns for a more practicable plan that put the collection front and center (and still allowed them to dismantle the Folk Art Museum as they wanted). Curators quickly rehung their holdings after President Trump was elected to his first term, pulling down Picassos and bringing out artists from Iran, Iraq, Sudan. Extraordinary gifts, above all the Cisneros collection of Latin American modernism, made good on Lowry’s globalization efforts.
The MoMA that re-emerged at the end of 2019, when the second expansion was completed, felt miles away from the conventions of its recent past — as if, after all the construction and growth, the museum was actually rediscovering the freedom of its first decade. The gallery display today is cosmopolitan and light on its feet, full of sly detours and unexpected connections. “Learning how to do a different program was just going to take time,” Lowry says now. “And it was going to involve some failures.” Maybe it took more time, and more failures, than he or any of us would have liked. But to walk through today, shuttling among media and across borders, is to discover a museum that has at last reconciled its popularity with its seriousness.
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THE SEARCH FOR Lowry’s successor, a parlor game among MoMA aficionados for nearly a decade, resolved itself with the elevation of Christophe Cherix, 56. He is one of the museum’s most intelligent curators, and his selection in March read as a no-messing-around reaffirmation from MoMA’s trustees to research and scholarship. It is Cherix’s task, now, to face down the perils Lowry warned about at Party in the Garden: a meddlesome government, a faltering economy, a public that sees more pictures on their phones in one day than the museum has on its walls.
The museum has faced harder times than these; MoMA opened its doors on Nov. 8, 1929, a week and a half after the Wall Street crash. But the recent attacks on the Smithsonian’s museums for promoting “divisive, race-centered ideology,” and the speed with which law firms, universities, and television networks have capitulated to White House demands and suits, indicate that museums cannot affirm their independence through bylaws alone. It’s not enough to remain rich, popular and tax-exempt, not if you sacrifice the democratic “beliefs and commitments,” in Lowry’s words, that make our institutions matter. “What we do over the coming years will define who we are,” he cautioned. I don’t think he was referring just to the building we were sitting in.
There is a new acquisition by Lowry’s team of curators on view now, just off that central atrium that has drawn so many grumbles over the years. It is a painting in hot pinks and baby blues, and it looks somewhat abstract at first glance, but then two thick lines reveal themselves to depict two elevated freeways — and, on one of them, a flaming car diving off the edge. Done in 1981 by Carlos Almaraz, a Chicano painter whose work had never been in the collection until last year, it is a picture of modernity and danger, of charging forward like a torpedo moving through time, until you reach the future or careen off the edge. The title the Museum of Modern Art has given this gallery is “Destination Unknown.”
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Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.
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