MoMA Names Makeda Best as New Photography Chief

The Museum of Modern Art has named Makeda Best, a deputy director of the Oakland Museum of California, as its new chief curator for pictures, it introduced Tuesday. Her appointment ends a emptiness of almost 4 years at MoMA’s photograph division, in one of the prestigious positions within the area.

“This department has influenced, implicitly or explicitly, so much of how we understand the medium,” mentioned Best, who will start in her new position in September. In an interview, Best pointed to the legacy of Edward Steichen, who led MoMA’s photograph division from 1947 to 1962, and whose acquisitions included giant caches of pictures from the Farm Security Administration throughout the Great Depression. “Steichen talked about the collection he was building of F.S.A. photography as an argument about America,” Best defined. “And that became really influential to me as a curator. I’m someone who’s very much committed to big stories from the collection.”

Like Steichen, Best can be a photographer, who educated at CalArts underneath the artist Allan Sekula. She went on to finish a doctorate in artwork historical past at Harvard, and finally returned to Cambridge to function curator of pictures on the Harvard Art Museums. There she organized “Devour the Land,” an acclaimed exhibition of battle pictures, and “Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America,” which blended documentary imagery with literary historical past.

She joined the Oakland Museum in 2023, the place she has overseen its assortment shows and particular exhibitions. She has additionally continued to curate exhibits elsewhere; her exhibition “American Job,” surveying a century of labor and American pictures, was seen on the International Center of Photography in New York final yr.

MoMA’s photograph assortment, numbering some 35,000 prints and objects, consists of each artworks and documentary supplies from the daybreak of the medium within the 1840s to the current day. Since 2019, when MoMA reopened in an expanded headquarters, the museum has introduced pictures inside a single flowing narrative of recent portray, sculpture, drawing and design, reasonably than in a separate wing. “I do enjoy how the museum has integrated photography throughout the collection,” mentioned Best, including, “The actual choices that curators make are brought into sharper relief, and that process to me is exciting.”

While a lot of Best’s scholarship and curatorial expertise has centered on documentary and social pictures, she additionally needs to “expand the kinds of photography that we see” on the museum, and to reckon with the impact of digital media on how we take note of photographs. “Photography is a medium that’s always been in crisis, that’s always questioning itself,” she mentioned. “That is its history. So in many ways, this is another moment in which — as a field, as a medium — we’re trying to figure out who we are and what it means.

“And I think audiences are asking for different things as well. One way to read it is that they’re distracted, but another way to think about it is that they’re looking for something beyond content. They’re looking for experiences, connection.”

That requires a brand new method to set up and storytelling, Best argued: “It doesn’t work anymore just to hang things on the wall.”

Best succeeds Clément Chéroux, who led the pictures division from 2020 to 2022. (Roxana Marcoci, a senior MoMA curator, has been main the division on an interim foundation since then.) Best is the second chief curator appointed by Christophe Cherix, who turned director of the museum in 2025. In October he appointed Jodi Hauptman to steer the division of drawings, which Cherix himself chaired earlier than his promotion.