Massimiliano Gioni to Lead the New Museum After Nearly Two Decades Inside It
The New Museum has chosen Massimiliano Gioni, its artistic director since 2014, as its next director, setting up a leadership transition that keeps one of the institution’s most influential figures at the center of its future. He will begin on August 1, becoming only the third director in the museum’s nearly 50-year history.
The appointment follows Lisa Phillips’s retirement announcement last September and came after an international search. James-Keith Brown, the museum’s president, said the board took the process seriously before deciding that Gioni was the right choice. “After 27 years, we needed to do a full, proper search, and Mas was incredibly supportive of that — he encouraged it,” Brown told the New York Times. “Our best person was right in front of us,” he added.
Gioni, born in Busto Arsizio, outside Milan, came to New York in 1999 as a journalist with Flash Art. He joined the New Museum in 2006 as a curator and became artistic director in 2014. Over the years, he has helped define the museum’s curatorial identity through exhibitions that often place emerging artists in conversation with overlooked or cultish historical material. His projects there have included solo shows by Pawel Althamer, Ed Atkins, Lynda Benglis, Urs Fischer, Hans Haacke, Faith Ringgold, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
His current exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” opened in March and gathers work by more than 200 artists, architects, scientists, and others. The show also inaugurated the museum’s expansion by OMA, which doubled its size and gave Gioni a larger stage for the kind of intellectually dense, visually restless programming that has become his signature.
That approach has long distinguished him. In 2010, he curated a widely admired edition of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, followed by the Venice Biennale in 2013. At the New Museum, he also co-curated the first edition of the triennial “The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus” with Lauren Cornell and Laura Hoptman in 2009.
For a museum founded by Marcia Tucker in 1977, the choice signals continuity as much as change. Gioni’s first day in the director’s chair will be August 1, but the institution he is inheriting is already visibly larger, and perhaps more open-ended, than it was when he arrived.
