One of the world’s most important art museums has selected a new leader from within.
The Museum of Modern Art announced to its staff on Friday morning that its next director will be Christophe Cherix, 55, a quiet curatorial strategist behind some of the institution’s most critically praised exhibitions. In September, he will take over the leadership position from Glenn Lowry, who has guided the New York museum for almost 30 years.
It will be Cherix’s first time leading an institution. The museum — which has a sister institution, MoMA PS1, in Queens — is one of the biggest in the art world, with an endowment of nearly $1.7 billion.
The appointment was unveiled in a letter from the museum’s chair, Marie-Josée Kravis, and its president, Sarah Arison. The board, which was anxious about leaks to the news media, summoned its members to a hastily called meeting on Friday morning for a vote to appoint Cherix; among those who attended, the approval was unanimous.
“In all categories Christophe came out with flying colors,” Kravis said in an interview, citing “his strategic vision of the museum, his knowledge of art history” and “his deep and passionate interest for contemporary art and his management skills.”
In an interview, Cherix said he was both humbled and excited for the opportunity. “There is a long road ahead but an exciting one,” he said, adding that he wanted to broaden MoMA’s audience and help visitors get closer to the art.
Cherix (pronounced CHEH-reex) came to MoMA in 2007 from Switzerland, where he had served as curator at an art and history museum in Geneva. He was promoted three years later to chief curator for the department of drawings and prints; he has specialized in modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on the 1960s and ’70s.
While leading the department, Cherix oversaw an ambitious exhibition program that reintroduced audiences to comical artists like Marcel Broodthaers, serious thinkers like Adrian Piper and trailblazers like Betye Saar. One of his most recent curatorial successes, a 2023-24 retrospective of Ed Ruscha, known for his deadpan wit, received praise from critics. “To call it the show of the season is something of an understatement,” wrote Jason Farago of The New York Times.
“Christophe has been an outstanding curator,” Lowry said in a telephone interview. “He was a thoughtful choice. We realized that the best people in the field are at the Museum of Modern Art.”
Lowry said that he recruited Cherix to the department 15 years ago and that the two have worked closely together, including on fund-raising for exhibitions. And while the board clearly opted for consistency and continuity in choosing an insider like Cherix, Lowry added, “he also has his own ideas.”
Specifically, Cherix led the effort to combine the drawings and prints departments.
“MoMA has long been a leader in embracing new forms of expression, amplifying the voices of artists from around the globe and engaging the broadest audiences on-site and online,” Cherix said in a statement.
The game of succession at MoMA has fascinated the art world for the past few years as it became apparent that Lowry would be stepping down. Thelma Golden, who currently runs the Studio Museum in Harlem, was widely considered a front-runner, although some thought she would want to stay in her position to enjoy the fruits of her institution’s new building, which opens this fall.
It was also important to the board to choose someone who was young enough to bring new perspective to the museum and to ensure a potentially long tenure, said three people close to the process who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Michael Ovitz, the Hollywood mogul and collector who serves on MoMA’s board, said he admired in particular Cherix’s thorough approach to the recent Ruscha exhibition. “He didn’t put a picture in the show he didn’t go personally to look at,” Ovitz said.
With a staff of about 850 and an annual operating budget of about $185 million, MoMA has sometimes been likened to a corporation and Lowry — known for his easy facility with donors — to a chief executive.
Ovitz said it is, indeed, a complex operation that Cherix is equipped to handle. “There are government issues, there are city issues,” he said, adding of Cherix, “He’s a unique combination of a commercial thinker and an aesthetic thinker.”
Cherix will need to lead MoMA through a period of enormous turbulence. Cultural institutions are worried that the Trump administration could threaten their funding at a time when many museums are still feeling the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. (MoMA, for its part, has recovered a vast majority of its audience over the past five years. Museum attendance is down by 4 percent compared to prepandemic levels.)
“It’s going to be a long transition,” Cherix said, noting that he still had six months to prepare for the director role. During that time, he will be working with the curator Beverly Adams on an exhibition set to open in November about the Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam.
