Career
Lowry began his career as curator of Oriental art at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 1981. [7] Lowry was appointed in 1983 as the first director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary; he later became curator of Near Eastern Art at the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art (1984–1990). [8] He was director of the Art Gallery of Ontario from 1990 to 1995. He was appointed director of the Museum of Modern Art in 1995. [9]
In February 1999, Lowry and Alanna Heiss, former director of the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, initiated the merger of their two organizations. [3]
Lowry guided MoMA's 2004 expansion and accompanying capital campaign—raising $450 million for the new building and over $450 million for the endowment and other related expenses. [10] He and architect Yoshio Taniguchi unveiled the new museum on November 20, 2004. [11]
In 2018, Lowry and the MoMA board agreed to an extension of his role as the David Rockefeller Director of the Museum of Modern Art through 2025, which will make him the longest-serving director since the museum opened in 1929. [12]
Lowry led MoMA's 2019 renovation and expansion, developed with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, to add more than 40,000 square feet of new gallery space [13] and offer a deep rethinking of MoMA's collection, and, by extension, of the history of art for the past century and a half. [14]
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. The museum, America's first devoted exclusively to modern art, was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director. Under Barr's leadership, the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. Despite financial challenges, including opposition from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum moved to several temporary locations in its early years, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually donated the land for its permanent site.
Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.
Sadie T. Benning is an American artist, who has worked primarily in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning creates experimental films and explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity. They became a known artist as a teenager, with their short films made with a PixelVision camera that have been described as "video diaries".
Abigail Greene Aldrich Rockefeller was an American socialite and philanthropist. She was a prominent member of the Rockefeller family through her marriage to financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller Sr. Her father was Nelson W. Aldrich, who served as a Senator from Rhode Island. Rockefeller was known for being the driving force behind the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art. She was the mother of Nelson Rockefeller, who served as the 41st Vice President of the United States.
Glenn Ligon is an American conceptual artist whose work explores race, language, desire, sexuality, and identity. Based in New York City, Ligon's work often draws on 20th century literature and speech of 20th century cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness.
Vija Celmins is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational paintings. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Frank Gohlke is an American landscape photographer. He has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including those of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was an American art historian, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1988 to 2001, Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Professor of Fine Arts at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
Robert Gober is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is a college-affiliated art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is located on the Williams College campus, close to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Clark Art Institute. Its growing collection encompasses more than 14,000 works, with particular strengths in contemporary art, photography, prints, and Indian painting. The museum is free and open to the public.
Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward modern art; for example, his arranging of the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert, was "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."
Mary Lucier is an American visual artist and pioneer in video art. Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces that have had a significant impact on the medium.
Dorothy Canning Miller was an American art curator and one of the most influential people in American modern art for more than half of the 20th century. The first professionally trained curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), she was one of the very few women in her time who held a museum position of such responsibility.
Mary Lee Hu is an American artist, goldsmith, and college level educator known for using textile techniques to create intricate woven wire jewelry.
Leah Dickerman is the director of research programs at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She was formerly director of editorial & content strategy at MoMA. Serving previously as the museum’s first Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, a post endowed in 2015, Dickerman previously held the positions of curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA (2008–2015), acting head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), Washington, D.C. (2007), and associate curator in modern and contemporary art at the NGA (2001–2007). Over the course of her career, Dickerman has organized or co-organized a series of exhibitions including One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Works (2015), Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 (2012–2013), Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art (2011–2012), Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity (2009–2010), Dada (2005–2006), and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998).
Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator and educator. She is known as a painter and mixed media artist, her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She is known for the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her artwork; she has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art."
Bates Lowry was an art historian who was a director of the Museum of Modern Art and founding director of the National Building Museum.
Senga Nengudi is an African-American visual artist and curator. She is best known for her abstract sculptures that combine found objects and choreographed performance. She is part of a group of African-American avant-garde artists working in New York City and Los Angeles, from the 1960s and onward.
Patricia "Patty" Phelps de Cisneros is a Venezuelan-born Dominican art collector and philanthropist who focuses on Latin American modernist and contemporary art from Brazil, Venezuela, and the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay. Since the 1970s Cisneros has supported education and the arts, with a particular focus on Latin America. Along with her husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros, she founded the New York City and Caracas-based Fundación Cisneros. In the 1990s the Fundación's primary art-related program became the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. In 2016, Cisneros donated 102 modern and contemporary artworks from the 1940s to 1990s to the Museum of Modern Art, establishing the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.
Lynn Zelevansky is an American art historian and curator. Formerly Henry Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, she is currently based in New York City. Zelevansky curated "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama" (1998) and "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form" (2004) for Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1995 to 2009. While working at MoMA (1987–1995), she curated “Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties” (1994), that institution's first all-female exhibition. AICA awarded it "Best Emerging Art Exhibition New York."
