The Bronx Museum of the Arts has named Shamim M. Momin as its next director and chief curator. She will begin in the role in early September, succeeding Klaudio Rodriguez, who departed the museum last September to lead the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg in Florida.
Momin was most recently the director of curatorial affairs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, where she worked from 2018 to 2024. During her tenure, she curated the group exhibition “In Plain Sight,” which looked at artists who practices address histories typically hidden from the public, and oversaw commissions by Tala Madani, Gary Simmons, Kelly Akashi, Hank Willis Thomas, Donna Huanca, Diana Al-Hadid, and others.
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In 2009, she cofounded LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), an LA-based nonprofit focused on site-specific public art commissions. Between its founding and her departure in 2018, she curated more than 100 commissions from more than 300 artists. Previously, she was an associate curator at the Whitney Museum and the branch director of its Midtown outpost, the now closed Whitney Museum at Altria, where she organized more than 50 projects. She also co-curated the 2004 and 2008 editions of the Whitney Biennial.
In an interview, Momin said she was interested in taking the directorship because she sees the Bronx Museum as “a museum that is so aligned with the practice and values that I believe most in. The Bronx Museum has been a paradigmatic institution, supporting the diversity of artists, the richness of its community, the connection to its community, and the ability to make art accessible to all, as well as providing artists, who may not have had as foregrounded a space in the in the central narrative, a space to explore their ideas.”
The Bronx Museum is undergoing a $42.9 million renovation and expansion that is scheduled to open next year. Finding a director who could navigate its completion and think through the future of the museum was a priority for the board’s nine-member search committee, said Joseph Mizzi, the museum’s board chair, who led that group.
“We’re figuratively and literally in expansion mode, so we see Shamim as somebody who can take what we’ve been doing and do it more expansively,” Mizzi said.
Momin said she was looking forward “to what can be done with that new building in this world at this time” during “really transformative moment” for the museum. The new building, she said, provides the Bronx Museum with the opportunity “to have a greater place in the cultural landscape in presence and impact and identity” via the combination of exhibition and public programs it can offer across its increased footprint.
While Momin didn’t discuss specifics about her vision for the Bronx Museum, she said that her experience working in Los Angeles and Seattle “to build community, and organizational outreach and presence in thinking about very different constituencies and communities” will inform her “perspective for how we move forward with the Bronx Museum, respecting and deeply committing to the local community itself.”
By way of example, she pointed to the exhibitions she organized at LAND, which “allow[ed] artists to develop and realize ideas that were not comfortable in the museum space.” But more importantly, she said, the goal of that organization was to provide “what all communities deserve: the access to challenging, exciting contemporary art in their day-to-day life that came without the barriers to entry of a museum or a gallery.”
Momin’s role also includes the title of chief curator, which she said allows her to help shape the “vision, values, content that the institution supports” in its programming in addition to its overall strategic goals. She added, “If you’re going to be working with artists who are speaking, let’s say, about labor, equality, or diversity, you need to be speaking for from a position from a genuine stance for the museum itself is also speaking from those values.”
Momin takes over the Bronx Museum, which has $3.9 million annual operating budget, during a challenging moment for the arts and museums, which are under attack from the Trump administration.
“I feel that’s when you have to step up the most,” she said. “That’s where my responsibility lies, especially when the things I believe in most—nonprofit institutions, commitment to public service, and creating a space for art to be available to the full public—are threatened. With passion and alignment, we can continue to support that even in face of other changes that are happening.”