MoMA Names Makeda Best as Photography Curator

The Museum of Modern Art has appointed Makeda Best as its new chief curator for images, the New York establishment introduced on June 2, filling a place that had been vacant for the reason that departure of Clément Chéroux in 2022.

Best arrives from the Oakland Museum of California, the place she has served as a deputy director of curatorial affairs since 2023, overseeing assortment shows and particular exhibitions. Her new function, which is able to start in September, encompasses all elements of the division, together with acquisitions, installations, exhibitions, publications, and mortgage applications.

“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 an announcement. “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.”

Best is the second chief curator to have been appointed by MoMA’s new director, Christophe Cherix, who took over from Glenn Lowry, the museum’s long-serving head, in September final yr. Cherix beforehand appointed Jodi Hauptman to steer his former division of drawings and prints. Best will probably be one in every of few Black curators employed by MoMA beneath Cherix’s tenure and follows the departure of rising images curator Oluremi Onabanjo from MoMA to the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this yr.

After coaching as a photographer at CalArts, Best obtained a historical past of artwork and structure doctorate from Harvard—her dissertation targeted on Alexander Gardner, a Civil War photographer—and went on to function a images curator on the Harvard Art Museums. In Cambridge, her research fed into exhibitions together with “Devour the Land,” which appeared on the impression of U.S. militarism on the setting. Alongside her work on the Oakland Museum, Best has curated exhibitions elsewhere, together with “American Job” at New York’s International Center of Photography, a survey of Twentieth-century pictures documenting labor organizing and strike exercise.

MoMA, which has exhibited and picked up images since being based in 1929, boasts a large images assortment spanning 35,000 prints and objects. Since the museum’s renovation within the late 2010s, MoMA has built-in this assortment alongside works of portray, sculpture, and drawing, fairly than presenting it individually.

“Makeda’s distinguished career as a curator, scholar, and institutional leader brings a fresh vision to the field,” Cherix stated in an announcement. “She champions photography’s singular power to connect with audiences through storytelling, seamlessly crossing boundaries into sociology, environmentalism, performance art, labor, and civic life.”