Over the summer, just before departing the Museum of Modern Art as its longtime director, Glenn Lowry appeared to obliquely address the Trump administration’s ongoing attack on cultural institutions, noting that the veteran New York institution must fight to continue mounting the shows that it does.
“If we believe in a museum that celebrates the values of pluralism, that honors freedom of expression, and protects minority rights and dissent, then we will have to actively defend our values,” Lowry said in June at MoMA’s Party in the Garden, according to a New York Times appraisal of his 30-year tenure. “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.”
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Moreover, he said, “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.”
Trump has not yet come for MoMA, but he has repeatedly lashed out against the Smithsonian Institution, which operates a network of museums mostly based in Washington, D.C. The president has claimed that these institutions have “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and threatened a crackdown on the exhibitions they hold.
At least one artist has already claimed censorship amid the upheaval: Amy Sherald canceled her National Portrait Gallery survey, alleging that the museum asked her to remove a painting of a Black trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty.
Under Lowry, MoMA on at least one occasion mounted a presentation that was obliquely critical of the Trump administration. In 2017, when Trump banned citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US, MoMA quickly responded by installing works by artists who hailed from those nations in its permanent collection galleries. The move was widely applauded by critics in New York.
That presentation was an anomaly within MoMA’s programming, which generally has not been explicit in dealing with the policies of the current President.
Still, Jason Farago, the critic who wrote the Times appraisal of Lowry, suggested that the museum is likely to face the same pressures as other institutions across the nation. With a hint of ominousness, Farago quotes Lowry as saying, “What we do over the coming years will define who we are.”
Those future activities will be overseen by Christophe Cherix, who was named MoMA’s new director after serving as chief curator of drawings and prints. His first major project is a retrospective for Wifredo Lam, a Surrealist painter born in Cuba.