It’s generally thought of as the worst traffic fortnight in Manhattan: the weeks-long proceedings of the United Nations General Assembly, which ensnares all travel patterns on the east side of the island. Road closures, idling black cars, and battalions of cops and Secret Service agents make swaths of Midtown impossible-to-transverse hellscapes for a few days every September. By Tuesday evening, the construction around the JPMorgan supertall that’s taking over a full block on Park Avenue only added to the chaos, as did the flurry of e-biking meal couriers delivering sad desk dinners to still-working bankers. And that’s when President Joe Biden’s motorcade rolled through.
Amid the Midtown madness outside, a wonderful calm fell upon the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. A retrospective of the marvelously unclassifiable German artist Thomas Schütte had taken over the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, installed just in time for the opening cocktails. Met director Max Hollein, who told me he’s quite fond of Schütte and put him in several shows, walked into the room and marveled at the 12-foot-tall sculpture Vater Staat (Father State), on loan from the collection of Ken Griffin’s ex-wife, Anne Dias. A few floors down was a retrospective of the photographer Robert Frank—pics ranging from Beats goofing off to the Stones recording Exile on Main St.—and in the sculpture garden below, two full bars boozed up Gotham’s patrons of the arts.
Something else was in the air too. It had been a few weeks since MoMA director Glenn Lowry announced that he would be stepping down from the role in September 2025, which was not a shock, exactly—the usual age of retirement at MoMA is 65, and Lowry’s pushing 70. But his widely acknowledged successes led him to stay on for an extra five-year term that expires next year. And now that it’s official, all people can talk about when they talk about MoMA is…who will be tapped to run MoMA.
Understandably so. The job is arguably the plummest perch in all of museum-dom. Lowry’s had it for 30 years, reshaping the institution as the role of museum director itself shifted immensely across the field. Aside from a few dustups—various protests, a disgruntled ex-member’s alleged stabbing spree, the Björk show—Lowry’s a revered figure in the field. His departure announcement prompted a chorus of hosannas for his tenure followed by an inevitable question: Who can follow up a polymathic director beloved by both the budget teams and the curatorial teams, one who oversaw two renovation campaigns and is leaving the museum’s coffers fuller than they’ve ever been?
Vater Staat (Father State), 2010 (detail). Patinated bronze. 149 5/8 × 61 × 55″ (380 × 155 × 139.7 cm).Collection Anne Dias Griffin, Photo by Steven E. Gross. 2024 Thomas Schütte / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
“The thing that’s remarkable about Glenn—I’ve often been disturbed by how he has been framed as corporate, because he is immensely capable of using both sides of his brain. As I have often said to people, do you want a director who can’t count?” said Kathy Halbreich, who served as the associate director under Lowry for a decade of his tenure. “You must have a director that is able to be an equal in terms of financial planning, investment, and the financial side of the institution—and you want a director who is passionate about modern and contemporary art.
And now someone needs to follow in his footsteps. Halbreich, like many others contacted for this story, did not want to go on the record naming names—out of respect for the process, of course, but also because there’s a chance that all the prognosticators are dead wrong. It’s unlikely that the art cognoscenti were able to predict, in 1995, that the board of the world’s most prominent postwar art institution would pick Lowry, who specialized in Islamic studies and was then the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario.