Historic Appointment: Makeda Best, MoMA’s Incoming Chief Curator of Photography, ‘Brings a Contemporary Imaginative and prescient to the Subject’

THE PHOTOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT on the Museum of Modern Art in New York is welcoming a brand new chief. MoMA named Makeda Best as the subsequent Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography. A curator and educator, who can be photographer, Best is at present deputy director of curatorial affairs on the Oakland Museum of California. The new appointment announcement stated her “scholarship and curatorial practice are distinguished by intellectual rigor and a commitment to situating American photographic history within wider global stories, artistic practices, and social contexts.” The information was first publicized on June 2. Best is becoming a member of MoMA in September.

“After an extensive international search, we are thrilled to welcome Makeda as the new Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography,” MoMA Director Christophe Cherix stated in a press release. “Makeda’s distinguished career as a curator, scholar, and institutional leader—spanning major collections at Harvard and Oakland—brings a fresh vision to the field. She champions photography’s singular power to connect with audiences through storytelling, seamlessly crossing boundaries into sociology, environmentalism, performance art, labor, and civic life.”

 

Makeda Best. | Photo by Unique Nicole, Courtesy MoMA

 

The appointment of Best to go MoMA’s extremely regarded photography department is historic. She would be the first Black particular person to function chief curator of the pictures division (and first girl within the place on a everlasting, slightly than appearing, foundation). Best can be the primary Black girl to carry a chief curator position at MoMA because the museum was based in 1929.

(MoMA doesn’t have an over-arching, museum-wide chief curator. Each curatorial division is led by a chief curator/division head. Kynaston McShine (1935-2018) grew to become the museum’s first Black chief curator when he served as head of the Painting and Sculpture division, from 2001-03, and chief curator at-large, from 2003-09.)

Best would be the first Black particular person to function chief curator of the pictures division and the primary Black girl to carry a chief curator position at MoMA because the museum was based in 1929.

 

BEST HAS SERVED as deputy director of curatorial affairs on the Oakland Museum of California since August 2023. She oversees exhibitions and publications and leads the Curatorial, Design, Production, and Collections Management departments on the Oakland museum, the place “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory,” the primary museum retrospective of the Bay Area artist, lately opened.

Previously, Best was the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography on the Harvard Art Museums (2017-2023), the place her tenure included a stint as interim head of Modern and Contemporary Art, from February 2022 to July 2023.

Her exhibitions at Harvard Art Museums embody “Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970” at Harvard Art Museums (2021-22); “Crossing Lines, Constricting Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art”; “Winslow Homer: Eyewitness”; Harvard’s presentation of “Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America”; and “Please Stay Home: Darrel Ellis in Conversation with Wardell Milan and Leslie Hewitt” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. More lately, Best organized “American Job: 1940–2011” (2025), which was offered on the International Center of Photography in New York.

In addition to educating at Harvard and Tufts University, Best has been on school in tenure-track positions on the University of Vermont and the California College of the Arts (CCA). She earned a Ph.D., within the historical past of artwork and structure from Harvard University and obtained an MFA in studio pictures from the California Institute of the Arts, the place she studied with the photographer Allan Sekula (1951-2013) and filmmaker Billy Woodberry, a director who was a part of the L.A. Rebellion.

Best is a co-founder of Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a limited-life group whose said aim is to “create a more just museum sector by 2030.” She serves on the board of MMF as treasurer. In addition, her fellowship expertise consists of the Center for Curatorial Leadership and the Center for Curatorial Leadership/Studio Museum in Harlem program.

Best “brings a fresh vision to the field” and “champions photography’s singular power to connect with audiences through storytelling, seamlessly crossing boundaries into sociology, environmentalism, performance art, labor, and civic life.” — MoMA Director Christophe Cherix

MOMA WAS FOUNDED as a bastion of contemporary and up to date artwork supposed to showcase the artwork of the instances throughout a variety of mediums and subjects and, in current a long time, an array of cultures and views. Over the previous century, the museum has exhibited and purchased pictures and established a devoted division in 1940. The renowned collection has grown to greater than 35,000 gadgets—from daguerreotypes to trendy and up to date works—by artists, in addition to journalists, and self-taught photographers.

The chief curator position within the pictures division has been vacant for 4 years since Clément Chéroux departed in 2022. The place has been crammed on an appearing foundation by Roxana Marcoci, MoMA’s David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography. The arrival of Best overlaps with the departure of Peter Schub Curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who’s headed to a different main museum in New York. Onabanjo begins as curator within the Department of Photography on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in August.

When Best joins MoMA in September, she will likely be accountable for all facets of the establishment’s pictures division, together with particular exhibitions, assortment installations, acquisitions, and institutional loans, and publications.

“MoMA is one of the only institutions in the world with the platform and the commitment to photography that these times demand,” Best stated in a press release. “I am deeply honored to join the Museum, to work alongside its extraordinary team, and to leverage and grow its collection. Photography is vital to understanding who we are as a society. I look forward to pursuing new research, and to helping audiences develop the visual and critical tools needed to navigate this complex world.” CT

 

READ MORE about Makeda Best’s new appointment at MoMA within the New York Times

 

BOOKSHELF
Makeda Best edited “Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970,” which obtained the 2022 Aperture/Paris Photo Photography Catalogue of the Year Award. She can be the creator of “Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Democracy and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America.” The newly printed exhibition catalog “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory” paperwork the primary museum retrospective of the Bay Area artist on the Oakland Museum of Art. Best wrote the introduction to the amount. In addition, Best contributed to “Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985,” “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer,” and “Into the Time Horizon,” which was simply printed to accompany a landmark exhibition on the Nevada Museum of Art that brings collectively about 200 artists across the topic of environmentalism.