Glenn D. Lowry

EO

You’ve been interviewed a million times, so I’m less interested in the chronology of your career than in how you thought your way through it. You arrived at MoMA in the mid-1990s and inherited an institution with an existing apparatus, canon, and understanding of what modern art was and who it belonged to. Over the next three decades, you helped reimagine that institution in ways that bridged the past and the future simultaneously. I’m curious what that felt like in real time. What does it actually feel like to negotiate those competing needs and timelines while trying to move an institution forward without losing what made it matter in the first place?

I’m also interested in your own development alongside the institution’s because you had already lived several professional lives before arriving at MoMA. One of the things that particularly stayed with me was your work on Mughal architecture at Harvard. What led you to Mughal architecture in the first place?

GL

My story actually isn’t very complicated. I went to Williams College uncertain of what I wanted to do in life but assuming I would probably become a medical doctor. Pre-med turned me off medicine so quickly that I went to a college advisor and said, “I thought I was going to be pre-med all the way through. I can’t stand it. What should I do?” He said, “You’re at a liberal arts college. The whole point of being here is to take courses in subjects you know nothing about.” So I looked through a course catalog because there were no computers then, thumbed my way through hundreds of pages of course offerings, and eventually came across a course on Indian and Islamic art. It fit the assignment perfectly because I knew absolutely nothing about Indian art, Islamic art, or really art at all. The course happened to be taught by a charismatic teacher who made the subject feel urgent and fascinating. I stayed with it all the way through my undergraduate years and ultimately decided I was interested enough in Islamic and Indian art to pursue a PhD in the field.

That brought me to Harvard and eventually to early Mughal architecture, which fascinated me then and continues to fascinate me today. The dilemma, however, was that there were essentially no jobs in the field when I matriculated. I didn’t want to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship because I had already spent enough time in school as both an undergraduate and graduate student. I wanted to get out into the world and do something, which led to me becoming the founding director of a small college art museum at the College of William and Mary, probably because I was the only person who actually applied for the position rather than because of any innate ability. Three years later, one of the premier positions in Islamic art opened up and somehow, I got that job. There’s a much longer story there, but I ultimately became Curator of Islamic and Indian Art at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, where I happily worked for six years.

At a certain point, though, I found myself becoming less interested in field-specific questions and more interested in museums themselves. I had done enough exhibitions, acquired enough Islamic art, and spent enough time at the Smithsonian that I became increasingly interested in how museums function writ large. How do people use museums? Why do they use museums? What do they actually do in museums? What makes a museum engaging or meaningful to a public? Those questions slowly became more interesting to me than the narrower concerns of the field itself.

EO

Why?

GL

I don’t know that I can answer the why exactly. I simply found myself moving away from scholarship as a specialization and toward institutions as systems. Rather than remaining on the curatorial side, I began to think it was time to run a museum again. I was fortunate enough to become director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, which turned out to be a very good fit. My wife is Canadian and we wanted our children to understand what being Canadian meant as much as what being American meant, so it felt like the right moment for our family to move. It was also a fascinating moment in the institution’s history because the AGO was in the middle of a major physical and intellectual expansion. I was happily there for five years when I received a call asking whether I might be interested in becoming director of the Museum of Modern Art, which I wasn’t.

The headhunter, however, happened to be an old friend of ours. She had actually studied Islamic art with me at Harvard before leaving the field to become a headhunter and had taken the MoMA assignment with the promise that she could identify the next generation of museum directors. That’s how I ended up on her radar and eventually she convinced me to come down and at least have a conversation with the board.

EO

Do you think Washington changed you at all? Or was there something about being inside the Smithsonian ecosystem and existing among all of those institutions that informed the way you eventually approached museums and museum leadership?

GL

No, I don’t think so. If anything, it was the Art Gallery of Ontario that prepared me to become a director at MoMA because essentially everything one needed to know about running a major museum could be learned there, with the added advantage that you were slightly off screen and therefore your mistakes weren’t immediately visible to the entire world. There were certainly enough mistakes to send red flags to anyone who was paying attention, but it was an extraordinary apprenticeship.

I believed that the knowledge I had developed around Islamic and Indian art, and around making that material interesting and accessible to a public, could translate into a larger question: how do you take modern and contemporary art and make it meaningful to a broad audience? I arrived at MoMA at a moment when the trustees wanted change and, frankly, the senior staff wanted change as well, but nobody quite knew how to execute it. I happened to be the right person at the right moment with the right set of experiences and interests.

Because I came from outside the traditional modern art establishment, it was obvious to me that modernity and contemporaneity were not uniquely European or North American phenomena. If you study other cultures, that becomes self-evident very quickly. Even within Europe and North America there were entire communities of artists who had been excluded from the story: women, artists of color, Indigenous artists, and queer artists. You could go down the entire list of exclusions, some intentional and some not. The reading of modern and contemporary art that many museums promoted in the sixties, seventies, and eighties was a very narrow one. I understood that before I ever arrived because from where I stood it was impossible not to see it. My task at MoMA became understanding the strengths of the institution and the arguments it had historically made while also understanding their limitations and figuring out how to address those weaknesses without losing the strengths that made the institution so powerful in the first place.

EO

What about the job didn’t appeal to you initially? I spoke recently with Michael Govan and we ended up talking about something similar around LACMA and the difficulty institutions were having finding directors during these moments of transition. There seemed to be a broader hesitation among your generation about stepping into these roles. MoMA took a long time to find a successor, and LACMA would face a similar challenge nearly a decade later.

There was an older model of museum leadership that felt tried and true, and then there was your generation coming behind it with a different set of assumptions about what museums could or should be. What specifically made MoMA feel uninteresting—or even unattractive—to you at first?

GL

I wasn’t particularly interested in coming to New York for several reasons. First, I didn’t feel that I had finished the work I wanted to do in Toronto. Second, the museum had a reputation for being a very difficult place with very strong-willed curators who didn’t necessarily speak to one another. Third, I didn’t particularly want to live in New York, which struck me as a large, complicated, and expensive city that held very little allure for me personally. I liked living in Toronto. It was a comfortable place for our family and a place where we were happy. So, for all of those reasons, it wasn’t a position that held any immediate appeal.

What changed was meeting the board and the search committee and realizing what an extraordinary group of people they were. What became immediately apparent was the degree to which they were genuinely committed to rethinking the museum and equally committed to supporting the kinds of changes that would make the job intellectually interesting to me. That, more than anything else, was what ultimately persuaded me to take the conversation seriously.

EO

When you began thinking about the museum as a problem to solve, what were the most obvious things that needed to change? I’m tempted to frame it as an architectural question because the expansion ultimately becomes such a defining part of your tenure, but I’m curious whether that’s actually where the problem first announced itself. Did you arrive with a clear sense of the institutional culture you wanted to create, or did your understanding of the problem evolve once you were inside the building?

GL

Actually, the problem wasn’t architectural. The problem was intellectual. The question was how do you tell a more complex and nuanced story that doesn’t read like a series of inevitable chapters in a book? Once you start asking how to do that in real space, then you realize that you need certain kinds of galleries that allow for a more porous movement across space and time. Add to that the fact that it was evident to me almost immediately that the future of the museum was going to reside in its commitment to contemporary art, which itself required new and different spaces from the ones that already existed.

At that point the problem became architectural because if you wanted that porosity of movement and if you wanted galleries capable of sustaining a more robust presentation of contemporary art, then you were going to need new space. But the issue was never architecture for its own sake. The issue was understanding the intellectual direction first and then recognizing that in order to realize those ideas physically, the architecture would also need to change. So it became an architectural problem, but it didn’t begin as one.

EO

Can you speak more about that intellectual philosophy? Because one of the things I noticed looking back at those early years is that there was a very specific culture among departments and among curators, most of whom eventually left. How did you complicate the institution’s understanding of modern art while simultaneously simplifying the way the institution understood itself? How quickly did you realize that the problem wasn’t the collection itself so much as the framework through which the collection was being understood?

GL

Part of it was simply listening and learning. There’s an old adage that says you can’t learn if you don’t listen and you can’t listen if you’re the one doing the talking. So, I told the board that I intended to spend my first year simply listening and learning. I wasn’t going to make major decisions during those first twelve months because any decisions I made would have been based on insufficient knowledge. As it turned out, we began making decisions during the second half of that first year, but I spent an enormous amount of time listening to curators, trying to understand what they were doing from their perspective and why they were doing it.

At the same time, I was beginning to recognize where I thought the museum needed to go, which meant foregrounding contemporary art more aggressively and breaking down the barriers, silos, and walls between curatorial departments. When I arrived, there was a prevailing attitude that it was my department rather than our museum. If your responsibility is entirely self-defined and therefore nobody else’s business, you’re inevitably going to produce a siloed institution, which was exactly what we had inherited. A great deal of the work I did during my first five or ten years was trying to move the institution from the “I” to the “we.” It was our museum, not my museum. It was our collection, not my collection. It sounds simple, but it actually represents a profound shift in mentality.

And you needed that shift before you could even begin having conversations about other geographies, other practices, or communities of artists who had been excluded, ignored, or marginalized. The reality was that some departments already possessed much broader understandings of modernity than others. Painting and sculpture often had a relatively narrow reading of modern and contemporary art, while departments like architecture and design or film already had much broader ones. It wasn’t that the museum existed inside one box. It existed inside six different boxes. Once you began breaking down the walls between those boxes, the story immediately became more complicated.

Suddenly you could talk about Africa across departments. You could talk about Latin America, especially Brazil and Mexico, across departments. Obviously, there was still much more work to do, but the institution itself was already more complicated than it appeared. It had simply organized itself into relatively simple silos. It took me a while to understand that distinction, but once I did, it changed everything.

EO

What was the promise of contemporary art at that moment? Today contemporary art almost engulfs culture entirely, but in the 1990s that wasn’t yet the case. What did a commitment to the contemporary make possible that another vision of the museum could not?

GL

The options facing the Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s were actually quite straightforward and, interestingly enough, they remain more or less the same thirty years later.

• Option one: mission accomplished. We are interested in the period from roughly the 1890s through the 1960s because that’s when all of the great art was made and our responsibility is simply to preserve and interpret that moment. There were many curators and trustees who genuinely believed that there had been a golden age of modernism in Europe and North America and that this was sufficient.
• Option two: perhaps the golden age had not ended and simply needed to be extended forward in time.
• Option three: place a box around that historical moment, call it Museum One, and then build a completely separate institution devoted exclusively to contemporary art, effectively creating Museum Two.

I looked at those options and came to a different conclusion. If you believe that museums of modern art are modern not only in terms of subject matter but in terms of the idea of the institution itself, then museums of modern art should fundamentally differ from historical museums. The historical institutions place objects in the context of the past. You can look at Jackson Pollock at MoMA and understand him as a contemporary artist and think about the possibilities he opened for future generations. Or you can look at Jackson Pollock at the Met and understand him within a much longer lineage that stretches back through Monet, Caravaggio, and Giotto.

Our job, as I understood it, was always to remain in the present. That meant continually rethinking the relationship between the immediate past and the future. The space in which that conversation takes place is contemporary art.

EO

No, because I was going to say that even hearing the way you speak about it, “modern” doesn’t necessarily even mean “contemporary.” That’s where I think it starts to become slippery.

GL

I don’t think of modern as a stylistic term, nor do I think of modern as an era in the way you would think of the Renaissance, the Baroque, or antiquity. I think of modern as an idea, and that idea of the modern is still very much alive and present. There have been many different challenges to that idea and many different ways of questioning it. Whether we talk about the postmodern, which is all of the ideas and arguments that follow the modern, or whether we talk about the global as providing a different reading or understanding of the present than the modern allowed for, these are all part of the same conversation. As we’ve learned, the postmodern was simply an argument within the larger conversation around the modern. Even the notion of the global has fractured and means something very different today than it did twenty years ago.

So for me, and this is entirely personal, though it’s also an argument I made alongside my colleagues and certainly not one I was making alone, the idea of the modern has to do with something larger. Contemporary is simply the leading edge of the modern. If you think about Alfred Barr talking about the Museum of Modern Art as a torpedo moving through time, the nose is the ever-advancing future and the tail is the ever-receding past. The role of the museum is to exist in the body of the torpedo, not in the nose but not in the tail either. That body, for lack of a better word, is what I would call the present or the modern. It is always shifting and always moving through time.

The argument I would make about why the Museum of Modern Art is different in kind from other museums is that rather than trying to reveal, explain, or reify some singular understanding of the last hundred years, our responsibility is to suggest different ways one might understand those hundred years. And those hundred years are always moving forward. I would have been very happy, and nobody else at the museum was, to dispose of everything pre-1907 and perhaps even everything pre-1940. People always ask why and what that means. What it means is that those works are no longer essential to the stories we need to tell at the Museum of Modern Art.

They may remain essential from the standpoint of drawing a large public because who doesn’t want to see Van Gogh or Cézanne? But I begin with the belief that the art that will be made tomorrow is every bit as interesting as the art that was made yesterday. I genuinely believe that. You eventually arrive at a moment, as we did in the 1960s, where the past becomes a burden rather than a liberation.

EO

Yes. But did you—

GL

And I do think there are museums like the Met that do an extraordinary job telling the story of the past. There was actually a moment in the late 1940s when MoMA and the Met attempted to negotiate an arrangement whereby the Modern would give or sell everything older than fifty years to the Met in return for funds to continue buying contemporary work. It was, in many ways, the right idea badly executed. First, much of the work that was going to be transferred had originally been donated to MoMA, and those donors understandably objected to the idea that their gifts would simply be given away to another institution. Second, the amount of money the Met had available to compensate the museum bore very little relationship to the actual value of those works. They would have received masterpieces worth a tremendous amount of money while financially MoMA would have received only a fraction of that value.

Third, the trustees eventually asked a very reasonable question: we took all of the risk, we helped make these artists household names, and now we’re simply going to walk away from them? For all of those reasons, the arrangement collapsed. But it was a good idea.

EO

I mean, it largely became the model of the preceding decades. What I was really thinking about was the collection itself. You realized the promise of contemporary art—or perhaps more specifically the promise of MoMA’s relationship to the contemporary—and from there that philosophy branches outward into the curatorial departments. How did that philosophy become an institution?

GL

First of all, I shouldn’t say the board because not everyone felt the same way, but there were many trustees who were deeply interested in expanding the range of our collection and committed to acquiring works from a much broader set of practices and geographies. You had Patty Cisneros, who was particularly interested in Latin America. She certainly wasn’t alone, but she was perhaps the most visible advocate for that work. You had Aggie, who was deeply interested in women artists and artists of color. You had other collectors and trustees who were interested in Asia. So at the board level it actually wasn’t that difficult to make the argument that we needed to do more.

What took much longer was convincing curators to work together in pursuit of a broader and more complicated reading of modern and contemporary art. That was the difficult part. Once it clicked, it clicked. Some of that came through generational shifts as older curators retired and younger curators were hired. Some of it came through support from the board that enabled acquisitions in entirely new areas. And some of it came from finally breaking down the barriers embedded within our collecting committees.

The way MoMA works is that curators propose acquisitions, but the committees ultimately vote and determine what enters the collection. What I eventually realized was that the committees themselves were often more conservative than either the curators or even the board. In retrospect that makes perfect sense because the committee members were collectors and naturally, they were interested in what they themselves collected. It took time to understand that dynamic, to add new members with different interests, and to reshape those structures from within.

Ultimately it was simply work. I knew what I wanted to do by the end of my first year. It just took twenty-five years to fully accomplish it.

EO

Did you know that you would be there that long?

GL

No. I thought I could do this in ten years. Then I realized it took ten years simply to build the first building. Once the building was finished it became clear that the work itself wasn’t done and that many of the aspirations I had for the institution still hadn’t been realized. There were still people to convince and arguments still to make about how fundamentally different the museum needed to become.

I wanted to move away from an institution where permanence existed not only in ownership but also in display, a collection that very rarely changed, toward the idea of a collection that was never stable. The next decade became about convincing my colleagues that destabilizing the collection would produce a more interesting reading of modern and contemporary art, would invite new audiences into the museum, and would ultimately be truer to the true present.

EO

Can we talk about architecture? Because you studied Mughal architecture, and those aren’t neutral words sitting next to one another. Even the relationship between those two words carries something with it, something similar to becoming an expanded field. Those are some of the longest-standing structures in the world, and the symbolism embedded within them is immense.

GL

I really don’t think of MoMA as an architectural institution. I think of MoMA as an idea.

EO

Yeah. But idea versus concept?

GL

You could say concept or idea. For me, in this particular instance, they’re largely synonymous. The idea, in order to be realized, to be made manifest, requires a collection—art to be displayed and interpreted—and it requires a space in which to articulate the different narratives and stories embedded in those objects with a public. So the architecture is necessary to realize the idea, but the architecture follows the idea, follows the concept, and function.

If we do this well, another generation will come along and, in order to keep the idea alive—that is, to change it—it will also change the architecture. If you think about it, we demolished fifty percent of the pre-existing architecture in our first building campaign, radically reordered everything, and added more architecture in the second building campaign. We were lucky that we had the space to do it, the capital that enabled us to do it, a board that was keen to do it, and curators who had ideas they wanted to see realized. But I’m sure that will also be true in fifteen or twenty years, if not sooner, in the life of the museum.

EO

But I want you to specifically talk about Yoshio and that decision, because I don’t quite know how to articulate what I’m circling around here. In the current sociopolitical landscape, there are institutions and museum directors who believe that by speaking directly to the immediate community, by bringing certain representatives—architectural or otherwise—into the process, they can reflect that community back to itself.

Whereas you brought in a non-American architect to help make this American institution more American, or perhaps more itself. It feels like the decision was idea-driven rather than politically driven. If architecture follows the idea, then how did the idea inform the architecture and continue informing it over time? I think this is really what I mean when I say architecture. Not simply the physical building or the space itself, but architecture as a conceptual framework—an organism that continues to grow outward from a seed. The form changes, but the idea remains legible despite those changes.

GL

What we were trying to do, the problem we gave Yoshio, was to take the existing architecture, which was largely replicating the brownstone infrastructure of the surrounding city fabric. The projects of 1939, 1954, 1968, and even the tower in 1984 all used the module of the brownstone as the building block. The problem with the brownstone as a building block was that it resulted in a very long, narrow footprint and a kind of rabbit warren of rooms organized in an enfilade sequence.

You entered, exited, entered, exited, entered, exited. Then you moved upstairs and repeated the process. Because those rooms were sequential, the reading people inevitably took away was also sequential: one room led to the next room, one idea led to the next idea. Post-Impressionism led to Cubism, which led to Abstract Expressionism, which led to Pop Art. This sequence of isms became inevitable, even if the museum itself did not actually believe in that narrative. The architecture, because of how it had evolved, made that story appear true.

So problem number one for Yoshio was to create a much more open—and the word I would use is porous—suite of galleries with multiple entrances and exits so that things could branch off. You could present multiple media simultaneously. You could begin breaking down the idea of individual departments, which had led to a fractured reading of almost everything. We had to break down the departmental structure. We had to break down the hegemony of the enfilade gallery. We had to create more public space so people would feel more comfortable in the museum. And we had to create space capable of showing contemporary art. Yoshio was not selected because he was Japanese. He was selected because he presented the most thoughtful solution to those problems.

EO

I suppose that’s really my question. MoMA’s problem wasn’t identity or context in the way that it often is for other museums. Architecture became a problem for the Whitney. Space became a problem for the Whitney, and then context changed once it moved downtown. But if ideas—or perhaps the idea, singular—were the central problem for MoMA, how did that problem continue to evolve over your thirty years there? And can you also speak to PS1? Because I’m curious how that same problem of the idea continues to persist and reproduce itself over time.

GL

In very simple terms, our commitment to contemporary art required more space for living artists and a larger cohort of curators interested in contemporary practice. When I looked around, I realized there was no reason to build that infrastructure from scratch when PS1 was already doing much of what I thought needed to be done and, as it happened, was simultaneously on the verge of bankruptcy and trying to preserve its founding vision.

They needed, for lack of a better phrase, the stability and organizational capacity of MoMA, and we needed their expertise and their space. So we merged. It was one-stop shopping for everyone involved. They preserved their mission and we became the largest institution in the world committed to contemporary art. In one move we largely solved the problem of contemporary art, or at least the institutional capacity to engage with it seriously.

The merger gave us access to new audiences, more space, different artists, and a fundamentally different curatorial culture. It became an essential component in expanding the energy around the idea that modern art—or contemporary art, I don’t make a large distinction between the two—remains unfinished. The story is still being told. The arguments are still being made. And one of the museum’s responsibilities is to constantly demonstrate that the same works of art can mean radically different things in different contexts.

EO

But had examples like MOCA and the Geffen already entered your thinking? Was the multi-campus institution already conceptually in play? Because part of what fascinates me about PS1 is that, on one level, it looks like a real estate decision—or an acquisition of institutional intellectual property—but it happened in such a way that it felt almost conceptually seamless.

GL

The difference is that MOCA may have needed the space—or had the opportunity to acquire the space—and largely expanded its existing program into that space.

In our case, we certainly needed the space, but we also needed new and different programming. In merging with PS1, we were also engaging with a different cohort of curators, a different public, and a different group of artists. So, we weren’t simply expanding the institution. We were transforming it.