Lisa Phillips became the director of the New Museum in 1999, and embraced questions of what contemporary art might become in the new millennium. After two major building expansions, dozens of exhibitions and one bitter unionization fight, Phillips — one of the most powerful women in the art world — has decided to retire.
On Thursday, she announced plans to depart the New Museum in April, after the institution opens its 62,000-square-foot expansion that cost $82 million and will double the museum’s overall space when it opens, which officials project will be at the end of the year.
“It’s just the right time for me to step down,” Phillips, 71, said in a phone interview.
Her departure arrives during a period of generational change in the fine arts — and few executives have spent longer running a major art museum. The exception was Glenn Lowry, who retired as the Museum of Modern Art’s director earlier this month after 30 years.
Lowry could rely on MoMA’s brand recognition and history of charitable trustees when he took the reins, but Phillips needed to scale the museum’s finances with her ambitions. “One of my first priorities is to make sure everyone knows of the museum’s existence, its location and its programming,’‘ she said in 1999, when she took over the artist-led institution from its founder, Marcia Tucker. “I want to make sure the New Museum is a must-see stop on anyone’s itinerary when in New York.”
Phillips’s success in courting donors including Toby Devan Lewis, helped the New Museum grow from a loft on Broadway in SoHo into its current purpose-built location at 235 Bowery in 2004, where it became a tourist destination — despite its lack of a collection of its own. She also helped convince the philanthropist James Keith Brown to become the museum board’s president in 2013 and promoted the curator Massimiliano Gioni to artistic director in 2014.
“Lisa has been a phenomenal leader,” Brown said in a phone interview. “She was always fighting for underdogs.”
During her tenure, the museum staged exhibitions for artists like Faith Ringgold, Paul McCarthy and Wangechi Mutu. Annual attendance under Phillips grew significantly from 45,000, when she started, to nearly 450,000 in more recent years. She also created an endowment from scratch to where it stands today, at $20 million — a healthy sum for an institution that doesn’t have to worry about acquiring and storing art.
“For all the risks we take in our programming, we are fiscally pretty conservative,” said Phillips, who said the museum now has a goal of raising the endowment to $50 million by 2027, its 50th anniversary. “We don’t like debt.”
But alongside her successes, there have also been some missteps.
Phillips’ decision to greenlight a 2010 show of the private collection of a trustee, Dakis Joannou, curated by his prized artist, Jeff Koons, earned negative reviews from some art critics who accused the museum of “pandering.”
And in 2007, just a few years after the museum’s first devoted building by SANAA, the Pritzker-Prize-winning architectural team from Japan, opened on the Bowery, Phillips had to contend with electrical issues and leaky ceilings.
She later faced scrutiny from employees who unionized after tense negotiations in 2019 where staff complained about unhealthy work conditions, low pay and ethical concerns. Employees also pointed to the high salary that Phillips earned when compared to those of directors at similarly sized institutions. (According to the museum’s most recent tax filings, she earned almost $900,000 in total compensation; in 2019, she earned $768,000.)
Phillips defended her record in a statement at the time, saying that “a diverse, exciting, and creative space for experimentation for team members and visitors alike speaks for itself.”
During an interview this week, she expressed regret about the museum’s opposition to the union. “We were really not prepared,” Phillips said. “At first, I felt that it was antithetical to the culture of the museum. But then I began to see that this is very much a new generation speaking, and we needed to listen.”
She also touted the continued growth of programs like New Inc, an incubator for artists and creative entrepreneurs that started in 2014.
With the opening of a new building, Phillips said she decided that it was time for a change in leadership. When her contract expires in April, she will move into the role of director emeritus of the institution. An international search for her replacement will begin in the coming weeks.
She fondly recalled weekly meetings with her own predecessor after Tucker retired from the New Museum. “She would give me some great advice,” Phillips said, “including: don’t die at your desk.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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