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Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Director Glenn D. Lowry has announced that he will step down from his post in 2025, bookending three decades at the institution’s helm. The later years of his tenure have been marked by union actions as well as protests targeting various museum board members’ investments in mass incarceration, oil and gas extraction, and military weapons manufacturing.
Lowry assumed the director role at MoMA in 1995 after five years as the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Shortly thereafter, Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s was selected to design the major expansion to restructure and double the exhibition space at the 53rd Street institution, which broke ground in 2001 and was completed in late 2004. In 1999, Lowry and Alanna Heiss, founder of the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, fostered a merger agreement that preserved the Queens space, renamed to MoMA PS1 in 2010 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the collaboration.
Despite its successful swell and a second expansion completed in 2019, the museum has drawn controversy under Lowry’s leadership. Following stalled negotiations for union contracts, some staff mounted museum pickets, walkouts, and protests to coincide with high-profile events in 2015 and 2018. During a post-quarantine rebound effort in 2022, the museum offered employees unionized under IUOE Local 30 job security in exchange for skipping salary or wage increases for two years. Many of these same employees had just forgone contracted raises for 2020 and 2021 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beyond labor disputes, the museum has also been the site of multiple demonstrations led by groups including Decolonize This Place (DTP) and MoMA Divest, which aimed to draw attention to the museum’s sources of funding. Board member and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was the subject of multiple MoMA actions calling out his connection to the Trump administration as well as his investments in private prison companies and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Activists have also called for hedge fund manager Steven Tananbaum to be removed as a MoMA trustee for profiting off the Puerto Rico debt crisis.
Strike MoMA was one of the most notable protest efforts targeting the “toxic philanthropy” exhibited by the museum’s board and trustees. The 10-week activism campaign in 2021 zeroed in on Leon D. Black, then-board chairman and former CEO of Apollo Global Management, for his connection to convicted sex offender and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The movement also targeted Fink, Tananbaum, Ronald Lauder, Glenn Dubin, and Steven Cohen among others for involvement in capitalist ventures connected to mass incarceration, environmental destruction, and military-grade weapons manufacturing.
Throughout the weeks-long protests, Strike MoMA called Lowry a “gaslighter-in-chief” after he denied that museum security behaved violently while trying to prevent protesters from entering MoMA in a staff-wide email leaked to Hyperallergic. Lowry said that “any physical contact that occurred on Friday was the result of protesters’ actions,” asserting that “at no time did a security officer attack a protester.”
Black stepped down from his chairman role in March 2021, but he remains on the museum’s board. He was succeeded as chairman by current Chair Marie-Josée Kravis, who has also drawn immense criticism as well as calls for removal from the board for her and her husband Henry’s private equity firm that has invested billions into the fossil fuel industry, as well as their donations to the Trump administration. In September 2023, 16 climate activists were arrested at the MoMA for attempting to stage an overnight protest calling on the museum to “Drop Kravis.”
In early 2024, after some 800 protesters managed to shut down the museum for a peaceful, arrest-free protest for Palestine that targeted Kravis and other board members, MoMA found itself at the center of controversy weeks later when a visitor was initially denied entry for having a keffiyeh in their bag. In a statement to Hyperallergic, the museum apologized and clarified that security had misidentified the scarf it as a drop-down banner.
According to an official statement from the museum, Lowry will deliver the Chaire de Louvre lectures at the Louvre Museum in Paris in the fall of 2025. The board will soon commence an international search for a succeeding director for the museum.
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