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Tag: moma

  • Observer’s Must-See Museum Shows of 2026

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    • Gallerie Dell’Accademia, Venice
    • May 6 – October 19, 2026

    Marina Abramović is one of those artists who has never stopped giving the art world something to talk about, from the early provocative performances that pushed the limits of endurance and transformed visceral traumatic catharsis into art to her later shift toward more spiritual and energetic rituals aimed at collective healing and reconnection. Over the decades, she has continued to reinvent the possibilities of performance, turning the body, her own and the audience’s, into a site of vulnerability, transformation and shared experience, in the process becoming both an icon of contemporary art and, in many ways, a shamanic healer for a troubled collectivity. In 2026, Abramović will make history as the first woman to receive a major exhibition at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, which opens at the height of the art calendar during the 61st Venice Biennale. Marking the artist’s 80th birthday, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” will stage a resonant dialogue between her pioneering performance practice and the Renaissance masterpieces that have shaped Venice’s cultural identity. Iconic works such as Imponderabilia (1977), Rhythm 0 (1974), Light/Dark (1977), Balkan Baroque (1997) and Carrying the Skeleton (2008) will appear alongside projections of early performances. One of the central highlights will be Abramović and Ulay’s Pietà (1983) shown in direct dialogue with Titian’s final unfinished Pietà (c. 1575-76), an unprecedented historic pairing that reframes Renaissance themes of grief, transcendence and redemption through a contemporary lens while underscoring the body’s enduring role as a site of suffering and spiritual elevation. Curated by Shai Baitel, artistic director of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will unfold across both the museum’s permanent collection galleries and its temporary exhibition spaces, a first in the institution’s history, embedding Abramović’s work deep within the city’s artistic patrimony. At its core, “Transforming Energy” is an encounter between past and present, material and immaterial, body and spirit, revealing how Abramović’s lifelong exploration of endurance, presence and transformation resonates powerfully within Venice’s centuries-old visual language.

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    Elisa Carollo

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  • Inside the MoMA Succession Sweepstakes

    Inside the MoMA Succession Sweepstakes

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    It’s generally thought of as the worst traffic fortnight in Manhattan: the weeks-long proceedings of the United Nations General Assembly, which ensnares all travel patterns on the east side of the island. Road closures, idling black cars, and battalions of cops and Secret Service agents make swaths of Midtown impossible-to-transverse hellscapes for a few days every September. By Tuesday evening, the construction around the JPMorgan supertall that’s taking over a full block on Park Avenue only added to the chaos, as did the flurry of e-biking meal couriers delivering sad desk dinners to still-working bankers. And that’s when President Joe Biden’s motorcade rolled through.

    Amid the Midtown madness outside, a wonderful calm fell upon the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. A retrospective of the marvelously unclassifiable German artist Thomas Schütte had taken over the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, installed just in time for the opening cocktails. Met director Max Hollein, who told me he’s quite fond of Schütte and put him in several shows, walked into the room and marveled at the 12-foot-tall sculpture Vater Staat (Father State), on loan from the collection of Ken Griffin’s ex-wife, Anne Dias. A few floors down was a retrospective of the photographer Robert Frank—pics ranging from Beats goofing off to the Stones recording Exile on Main St.—and in the sculpture garden below, two full bars boozed up Gotham’s patrons of the arts.

    Something else was in the air too. It had been a few weeks since MoMA director Glenn Lowry announced that he would be stepping down from the role in September 2025, which was not a shock, exactly—the usual age of retirement at MoMA is 65, and Lowry’s pushing 70. But his widely acknowledged successes led him to stay on for an extra five-year term that expires next year. And now that it’s official, all people can talk about when they talk about MoMA is…who will be tapped to run MoMA.

    Understandably so. The job is arguably the plummest perch in all of museum-dom. Lowry’s had it for 30 years, reshaping the institution as the role of museum director itself shifted immensely across the field. Aside from a few dustups—various protests, a disgruntled ex-member’s alleged stabbing spree, the Björk show—Lowry’s a revered figure in the field. His departure announcement prompted a chorus of hosannas for his tenure followed by an inevitable question: Who can follow up a polymathic director beloved by both the budget teams and the curatorial teams, one who oversaw two renovation campaigns and is leaving the museum’s coffers fuller than they’ve ever been?

    Vater Staat (Father State), 2010 (detail). Patinated bronze. 149 5/8 × 61 × 55″ (380 × 155 × 139.7 cm).Collection Anne Dias Griffin, Photo by Steven E. Gross. 2024 Thomas Schütte / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

    “The thing that’s remarkable about Glenn—I’ve often been disturbed by how he has been framed as corporate, because he is immensely capable of using both sides of his brain. As I have often said to people, do you want a director who can’t count?” said Kathy Halbreich, who served as the associate director under Lowry for a decade of his tenure. “You must have a director that is able to be an equal in terms of financial planning, investment, and the financial side of the institution—and you want a director who is passionate about modern and contemporary art.

    And now someone needs to follow in his footsteps. Halbreich, like many others contacted for this story, did not want to go on the record naming names—out of respect for the process, of course, but also because there’s a chance that all the prognosticators are dead wrong. It’s unlikely that the art cognoscenti were able to predict, in 1995, that the board of the world’s most prominent postwar art institution would pick Lowry, who specialized in Islamic studies and was then the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • “A Rare and Special Cinema Artist”: Guillermo del Toro Honored at MoMA’s Film Gala

    “A Rare and Special Cinema Artist”: Guillermo del Toro Honored at MoMA’s Film Gala

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    Guillermo del Toro was already having a pretty great fall. Reviews of his reinvention of Pinocchio have been coming in, and The Guardian gave the film five stars, praising del Toro’s “monstrous cinematic skills.” This week, Taylor Swift, herself a budding director, remarked that if she could switch places with anyone in Hollywood for one day, it would be del Toro. “Imagine having that imagination, that visual vocabulary, and that astonishing body of work,” Swift said in a Q&A with The Hollywood Reporter. And then, on Thursday, the Museum of Modern Art honored del Toro at its annual film benefit, sponsored by Chanel, with a blowout bash in the museum’s grand atrium, where one movie star after another sang his praises. 

    “Although Taylor Swift did just say that she wants to Freaky Friday body-swap with you,” Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s chief curator of film, said to del Toro in the middle of the formal dinner, “For further confirmation of your amazingness, let’s turn, of course, to your collaborators.”

    Richard Jenkins at The Museum of Modern Art Film Benefit Presented by CHANEL, a Tribute to Guillermo del Toro.By Neil Rasmus/BFA.

    First up was Richard Jenkins, who recalled receiving, as a 69-year-old career-long character actor, a script from the maestro and an offer for a starring role in The Shape of Water. 

    “And I thought to myself, Is this an answered prayer?” Jenkins said. 

    The gig got him an Oscar nomination and led to a role in del Toro’s next movie, Nightmare Alley. As the applause scattered, Jenkins said, “Now somebody really interesting is going to talk—here’s a video by the great Cate Blanchett.”

    “You are a rare and special cinema artist and it’s a privilege to know you,” Blanchett said from Australia, where she’s on set. “So the honor is in fact all ours.”

    Next up was Tim Blake Nelson, who recalled meeting del Toro at the Venice Film Festival while picking up an award for the absent Joel and Ethan Coen, as one does. Nelson called del Toro “perhaps the most optimistically generous lover of life I have ever encountered.” 

    “To work with him, to break bread with him, to listen to him, to be heard by him, simply makes you better, because you always part knowing how profoundly lucky you are to be alive at the same time he is,” Nelson said. 

    Guillermo del Toro and Jessica Chastain.By Neil Rasmus/BFA.

    And then Jessica Chastain took the stage and compared del Toro’s directing methods to Terrence Malick’s, whom she said she’s close enough to call “T. Mally.” She referred specifically to a scene she and del Toro were shooting for Crimson Peak when she had to slam a cast-iron skillet—“Which are way heavier than they look by the way,” Chastain informed the crowd—down in front of her costar Mia Wasikowska. It was super late at night and they went take after take, as del Toro just wasn’t feeling it. Then, around 2 a.m., del Toro told Chastain to fill herself up with as much loathing and hatred as possible and “just see what happens.”

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    Nate Freeman

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