Massimiliano Gioni Will Lead the New Museum
By Andrew Russeth
Ending months of speculation, the New Museum said today that it has selected Massimiliano Gioni, its artistic director, to be its next director. Gioni has been with the New York standby since 2006, and will take the helm in August. Its previous leader, Lisa Phillips, announced her retirement last September.
Sign up for our daily newsletter.
Gioni turned four the year that the New Museum opened, 1977, and he will be only its third director in almost a half-century. Its founder, the inimitable Marcia Tucker, ran the institution until 1999, when Phillips succeeded her.
Sign up for our daily newsletter.
At the New Museum, Gioni’s exhibitions have frequently managed to be at once lively, surprising, and complex, juxtaposing venturesome work by emerging artists with deep-cut selections from the past. While aiming to please a broad audience, he uncorks rare and cultish delights.
The new chief’s current show, “New Humans: Memories of the Future” is exemplary of that approach, bringing together material by more than 200 artists, architects, scientists, and more. Anicka Yi‘s astonishing float around one room, not far from Carlo Rambaldi’s animatronic body the film star E.T. It opened in March, inaugurating an expansion from OMA that doubled the size of the museum.
“In a society and a culture in which everything has a message and everything has a meaning and everything has a purpose,” Gioni told the New York Observer in 2009, “I think we should cherish things that are obscure, that are directionless, that are useless, that are complicated beyond reasonable levels. That’s the greatness of art—even in New York, where everything has a price.”
Gioni’s promotion is the capstone of a fast-rising career that saw him curate a much-loved edition of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2010, when he was in his mid-30s, and a Venice Biennale that was also widely admired in 2013, when he was 39. He came to the New Museum in 2006, serving first as a curator before becoming artistic director in 2014. Born in Busto Arsizio, outside Milan, he came to New York in 1999 as a journalist with Flash Art.
The museum conducted an international search for a new leader, according to the New York Times, which was first with the news. James-Keith Brown, the museum’s president, told critic Jason Farago, “After 27 years, we needed to do a full, proper search, and Mas was incredibly supportive of that—he encouraged it.” Ultimately, though, the board decided that “our best person was right in front of us,” Brown told the paper.
After 20 years at the New Museum, Gioni’s list of curatorial credits there is long, and includes solo shows by artists like Pawel Althamer, Ed Atkins, Lynda Benglis, Urs Fischer, Hans Haacke, Faith Ringgold, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. That list could go on for a long while. With Lauren Cornell and Laura Hoptman, he also curated the sprightly first edition of the museum’s triennial, “The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus,” in 2009.
Gioni’s first day in the director’s chair will be August 1.
This article was originally published by Artnet News.