Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has announced that he will leave his position in 2025, marking three decades at the helm of the institution. The later years of his tenure were marked by industrial action and protests against several museum board members’ investments in mass incarceration, oil and gas extraction, and military weapons production.
Lowry took on the director role at MoMA in 1995 after five years as director of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Shortly thereafter, Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi was selected to design the major expansion to restructure and double the exhibition space of the 53rd Street institution, which broke ground in 2001 and was completed in late 2004. PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City advanced a merger deal that retained the Queens space, which was renamed MoMA PS1 in 2010 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the collaboration.
Despite successful growth and a second expansion completed in 2019, the museum has courted controversy under Lowry’s leadership. After stalled negotiations over union contracts, a number of staff members organized museum pickets, strikes and protests that coincided with high-profile events in 2015 and 2018. During a post-quarantine recovery effort in 2022, the museum offered workers who were unionized under IUOE Local 30 job security. in exchange for skipping salary or raises for two years. Many of these same employees had just opted out of contractual pay increases for 2020 and 2021 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition to labor disputes, the museum has also been the site of multiple demonstrations led by groups such as Decolonize This Place (DTP) and MoMA Divest, which aimed to draw attention to the museum’s sources of funding. BlackRock board member and CEO Larry Fink has been the subject of multiple MoMA actions highlighting his connection to the Trump administration, as well as his investments in private prison companies and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Activists have also called for the removal of hedge fund manager Steven Tananbaum as a MoMA trustee for profiting from Puerto Rico’s debt crisis.
Strike MoMA was one of the most notable protest efforts against the “toxic philanthropy” of the museum’s board and administrators. The ten-week activism campaign in 2021 targeted Leon D. Black, then 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 their involvement in capitalist enterprises linked to mass incarceration, environmental destruction and the production of military weapons.
During the weeks of protests, Strike called MoMA Lowry a “gaslighter-in-chief” after he denied that museum security behaved violently while trying to prevent protesters from entering MoMA in an all-staff email leaked to Hyperallergic. Lowry said that “any physical contact that occurred Friday was a result of the actions of protesters,” claiming that “at no time did a security officer assault a protester.”
Black resigned from his chairman role in March 2021, but will remain on the museum’s board. He was succeeded as chairman by current chairman Marie-Josée Kravis, who has also leveled enormous criticism and calls for removal from the board of directors for her and her husband Henry’s private equity firm, which has invested billions in the fossil fuel industry . their donations to the Trump administration. In September 2023, 16 climate activists were arrested at MoMA for trying to organize a nighttime protest calling on the museum to “drop Kravis.”
In early 2024, after approximately 800 protesters managed to close the museum for a peaceful, arrest-free protest for Palestine against Kravis and other board members, the MoMA found itself at the center of controversy weeks later when a visitor was initially denied entry for having An keffiyeh in their bag. In a statement to Hyperallergicthe museum apologized and clarified that security had incorrectly identified the scarf 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 start an international search for the next director for the museum.
