Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, will step down in January after 18 years in the post, the museum announced Monday. But she is not leaving MoMA: Temkin will have a newly created advisory role, in which she will spearhead programming for the institution’s 100th anniversary in 2029.
Temkin has been a curator at the museum since 2003 and was promoted to chief curator in 2008, becoming the first woman to lead MoMA’s richest and most powerful department. During her tenure, the museum undertook the most significant overhaul of its methodology since her predecessor William S. Rubin dominated the museum throughout the 1970s and ’80s.
Abandoning the reductionist narration of modern art as a clean succession of one movement after another — and abandoning its galleries overseen by curators from single departments — Temkin and her colleagues reimagined the collection by crossing boundaries, commingling paintings with photography, film and design. They introduced the Paris and New York avant-gardes that MoMA long celebrated to Latin American, Asian and African innovators.
Her efforts fully emerged with the opening of MoMA’s expanded building in 2019, which narrated art history in a freer register and with frequent rotations. The initial galleries, which have always highlighted Cézanne’s “Bather” and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” paired Faith Ringgold’s “American People Series #50: Die,” a 1967 response to racial violence, in a dialogue with Pablo Picasso’s 1907 “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” They now include milky Art Nouveau vases and a sequence from the silent film “A Trip to the Moon.” Piet Mondrian’s spare paintings in primary colors hang with abstractions by Joaquín Torres-García, Lygia Clark and other Latin Americans.
“I actually started here, in 1984, as a curatorial assistant,” Temkin said in an interview. “I had a visceral sense, as well as an intellectual or artistic sense, of what had been and how I wanted things to evolve.”
The siloed displays of painting and sculpture in one area, drawings and prints in another, had spurred curatorial turf wars. “What became very clear to me when I became head of the department,” Temkin said, “was that the painting and sculpture galleries — which held the vast majority of the space in the museum — had to be opened up to include the other disciplines if we were going to be able to write history in a way that felt, to me and my colleagues, far more true to the way artists actually work, and the way art shows up in the world.”
In addition to her work reshaping MoMA’s collection, Temkin curated dozens of exhibitions. They include “Color Chart” (2008), a surprising exhibition of modern painters and sculptors who rejected signature palettes in favor of unmixed, commercially available hues; “Picasso Sculpture” (2015, with Anne Umland), a stunning survey for which MoMA cleared out its permanent collection galleries and stayed open until midnight; and “Judd” (2020), a showcase of Donald Judd’s wood and steel specific objects.
Her shows were rigorous, although Temkin’s exhibitions also contained a laconic humor if you knew where to look. In 2019 she hung the Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s “Telephone Pictures,” which he had made by instructing an enamel fabricator over the phone, next to an actual Bauhaus-designed telephone.
That combination of meticulous scholarship and dry wit came through especially in what may go down as her most significant exhibition: the museum’s first survey in 50 years of the art of Marcel Duchamp, which drew over 611,000 visitors, making it MoMA’s highest-attended exhibition of 2026 to date.
Five years in the making, the Duchamp exhibition (curated with Michelle Kuo of MoMA and Matthew Affron of the Philadelphia Museum of Art) elicited both raves and heckles. In October, it travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Temkin spent her early career as a curator and presented a retrospective of the paintings of Barnett Newman in 2002.
Temkin, 66, will now be a strategic adviser to MoMA’s director, Christophe Cherix. In a statement, Cherix said that MoMA would begin a search for a new painting and sculpture chief immediately.
The timing of her departure had been uncertain because of a lack of clarity around a decades-long policy that required MoMA’s leaders to retire at 65. Despite that policy, the museums’ trustees voted in 2018 to extend the contract of Glenn D. Lowry, then its director, who stayed until he was nearly 70.
In a statement to the Times, a museum representative explained that the policy remained, but that “in certain circumstances in the past, the board has extended the tenure of some individuals beyond retirement age.” Temkin will be 67 when she ends her tenure as chief curator.
For Temkin, the only birthday that really matters is MoMA’s, and in her view the first, fledgling years of MoMA, under its young director Alfred H. Barr Jr., offer a blueprint for what it can be in its second century.
The centennial, she said, is a chance to recast “the museum from what it had become over time — the more authoritative, doctrinal MoMA of the late 20th century — to go back to our beginnings. When we were experimental. When our spirit was that of deep curiosity and intermixing of disciplines and fields.”
The task is to “roll up your sleeves, be daring, do a little bit of what you don’t know how to do, and then invite people in.”
The post After a Career Reshaping the Museum of Modern Art, Its Influential Curator Steps Down appeared first on New York Times.
