The Bronx Museum of the Arts on Thursday announced the appointment of Shamim Momin as its director and chief curator. Momin, most recently director of curatorial affairs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and co-founder of Los Angeles Nomadic Division, succeeds Klaudio Rodriguez, who left his executive director post last August.
Momin will begin the job in early September, amid a $42.9 million expansion and renovation that is underway and which is expected to be unveiled in fall 2026.
She was selected from more than 50 candidates in a nationwide search, said the board chair, Joseph Mizzi.
“We were really looking for an impact player, somebody that was ready to hit the ground running,” Mizzi said. “We believe with Shamim there is zero learning curve. She has the experience and her work has aligned with the work of the museum.”
In an interview, Momin acknowledged the tenuousness around support for the arts in the current political climate but said that only made her want this job more.
“The Bronx community has such an extraordinary history and diversity, and the institution has always been so embedded in acknowledging that and providing an accessible resource for creative folks and youth to be involved in the cultural landscape,” she said.
Rodriguez, who left a month after ground was broken on the building project, had been hired by the Bronx’s longtime executive director, Holly Block, as her deputy before her death in 2017. Through two stints as interim director before getting the top job in 2020, Rodriguez guided the museum through board changes, financial stresses and the Covid-19 pandemic, and oversaw the planning of the project, designed by Marvel Architects and now fully funded with public money.
Rodriguez left the Bronx to lead the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, in his home state Florida.
The Bronx museum, founded in 1971, offers free admission. It has a permanent collection of more than 1,800 contemporary works, with an emphasis on artists of color from the borough. Its current operating budget is $3.9 million, and pre-Covid annual attendance reached 100,000.
“Championing the values of social justice and artists that have been underrepresented in the mainstream is ever more important at this moment,” Momin said, “and I believe strongly that the supporters of the Bronx are aligned with that toward the future as well.”
The building project, overseen by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, is funded by $42.6 million from the City of New York and an additional $300,000 from New York State, with support of officials including the Bronx Borough President, Vanessa L. Gibson, and the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, Laurie Cumbo.
The museum’s campus — a synagogue renovated in the 1980s and a 2006 North Wing designed by Arquitectonica — has been reimagined with a dramatic multistory entrance, gathering space and cafe opening up the southwest corner of the building at the Grand Concourse and 165th Street.
The interior reorganization will yield more than 5,000 additional square feet of exhibition space and improve circulation and accessibility. The North Wing remains open, and in September will host the first institutional survey of the Rev. Joyce McDonald’s work.
For Momin, leading the museum into its next chapter is also a homecoming.
Born in New York City in 1973, the daughter of immigrants — her father from India, her mother from France — Momin intended to be a scientist, but changed course after taking an eye-opening art history elective at boarding school. She then attended Williams College in Massachusetts.
After graduating in 1995, Momin continued to the Independent Study Program at the Whitney, where she was hired in 1996 by Thelma Golden. Momin succeeded Golden as branch director of the museum’s Midtown branch, commissioning more than 50 projects by emerging artists, while working in tandem as an associate curator at the main museum. There she was a co-curator of the 2004 and 2008 Whitney Biennials.
In 2009, Momin moved to Los Angeles to co-found Los Angeles Nomadic Division, a nonprofit public art organization. After almost a decade there as director and curator, she went to the Henry in 2018, where she steered projects by artists such as Gary Simmons, Diana Al-Hadid and Hank Willis Thomas.
At the Bronx, a museum comparable in scale of exhibitions and budget to the Henry, the renaming of the top position to director and chief curator is “more aligned with the expertise I have and what I can bring,” she said.
Adam Weinberg, the former director of the Whitney, remembers Momin championing many artists, including Mark Bradford early on. “Her curatorial acumen is peerless,” he said.
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