Glenn Lowry to step down as MoMA director after 30 years

Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), has announced that he will be leaving the institution after 30 years in 2025. During his tenure at the museum, which has been the longest since that of his immediate predecessor Richard Oldenburg, Lowry has overseen the transformation of what is arguably the most important museum of modern art in the world and certainly one of the wealthiest. In 1999, MoMA and PS1 in Queens announced that they would merge, a development that was rounded off by the latter being renamed MoMA PS1 in 2010. Lowry has also overseen two major renovation projects. The first involved expanding on to an adjacent plot of land in 2004; the second resulted in the demolition of the nearby American Folk Art Museum and the building of a new extension that cost $450m, created more than 4,000 sqm of additional space and led to a much-praised rehang of the permanent collection in 2019. During the last 30 years, the institution’s endowment has increased enormously from around $200m to $1.7bn and its operating budget has grown from $60m to $190m. Lowry, a specialist in Islamic art who has described his role as being closer to that of a CEO, was previously the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he also oversaw a major expansion. The New York Times reports that the museum’s board invited him to renew his contract for another five years but, in Lowry’s words, ‘I didn’t want to be the person who stayed too long.’

The artist Rebecca Horn has died at the age of 80. She began making sculptures in the 1960s as a student in Hamburg and became known for her large-scale installations and film works. Horn made her name with a series of performance pieces called Personal Art (1968–72), in which she added certain fantastical appendages or ‘body extensions’ to her participants. It was her first work to explore the limits of the human body; many of her later sculptures, with their combinations of the organic and the inorganic, wittily blurred the boundaries between women and machines. Horn was the youngest artist to exhibit in the famous 1972 edition of Documenta curated by Harald Szeemann, which kickstarted her career as an international artist; she moved to New York in the same year. In the 1980s, she made sprawling, provocative installations that probed Germany’s post-war consciousness. In Concert in Reverse (1987), for example, she took over a municipal tower in Münster and filled it with sounds evoking the presence of the prisoners who had been held there during the war. She won the Documenta Prize in 1986, the Carnegie Prize in 1988 and the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale in 1997. The Haus der Kunst in Munich is currently holding a major retrospective of Horn’s work (until 10 October).

Denmark has returned an Indigenous feathered cloak, which dates back to the 17th century or earlier, to Brazil. The 1.8-metre long cloak, made of 4,000 bright feathers plucked from the scarlet ibis, has been on display at the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen for more than 300 years, reports the BBC. It arrived in Denmark no later than 1689, having been taken from the Tupinambá people, possibly by Dutch forces who occupied the Pernambuco region in eastern Brazil in the mid 17th century. The cloak was returned in a ceremony that was attended by the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Some 200 Tupinambá people, several of whom had travelled over 1,000 kilometres to see the garment, camped outside the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, waiting to see the cloak. According to the Guardian, the Nationalmuseet still holds three Tupinambá cloaks; a report published in 2018 revealed that six additional Tupinambá cloaks are currently held by museums in Belgium, Switzerland, France and Italy.

The Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), which is currently under construction in Benin City, Nigeria, has received a $3m grant from the Mellon Foundation. The grant is intended to support several initiatives over the next three years, including collections management, residencies, commissions and the preservation of traditional craft techniques. It will also finance the conservation of some of Nigeria’s historic architecture, including the ancient moats of Benin. ‘This grant will support us as we establish world-class facilities and programs that will elevate arts management, conservation, and archaeological research in West Africa,’ said Phillip Ihenacho, executive director of MOWAA, in a statement. The museum will be inaugurating its first purpose-built facility, the MOWAA Institute, in November this year. Samuel Reilly wrote about MOWAA in the July/August issue of Apollo.

The Italian culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano has resigned after admitting to an extramarital affair and hiring his lover as an advisor, reports the BBC. Since Maria Rosaria Boccia posted on LinkedIn in August that the minister had hired her as a consultant, Sangiuliano has been the subject of critical headlines. He initially denied the affair, but in a televised interview on 4 September he admitted to the relationship and the fact that he had hired Boccia as an unpaid advisor. He resigned on 6 September but maintains that he broke no ministerial rules and that ‘not a single euro’ was spent on Boccia’s travel expenses. Concerns about her access to ministry documents remain. This is the latest scandal concerning a member of prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s government; earlier this year, junior culture minister Vittorio Sgarbi resigned after accusations that he stole and modified a 17th-century painting by Rutilio Manetti. Alessandro Giuli, the head of the MAXXI Museum in Rome, who has historic ties to neofascist movements, has replaced Sangiuliano as culture secretary. Last week, it was announced that Giuli would be replaced for an interim period by Raffaella Docimo, a dentistry teacher and friend of Sangiuliano who has never led a museum and lists modern and contemporary art as a ‘hobby’ on her CV, reports the Art Newspaper. Docimo withdrew after two days following a public outcry. Earlier this week, the art historian Maria Emanuela Bruni was named as the interim director of the MAXXI Museum.