LEADERSHIP VOICES
Glenn Lowry
In His Own Words
By Maghie Ghali
Glenn Lowry served as Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1995 to September 2025— a thirty-year tenure that ranks among the longest and most consequential in MoMA’ s history. A Harvard-educated scholar of Islamic art, he expanded the museum’ s geographic and artistic scope far beyond its Western canon roots and grew MoMA’ s endowment from $ 200 million to $ 1.7 billion and its operating budget from $ 80 million to $ 190 million. Since leaving MoMA, he has turned his attention to the Arab world and beyond— advising the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah and the Diriyah Biennale Foundation in Riyadh and serving on the board of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi— while developing a leadership program for museum directors in partnership with the Art Bridges Foundation. From the challenges of explosive growth in the regional cultural landscape to the nuances of creating an authentically local museum identity, Lowry weighs in on how to approach institutional leadership.
Speaking to Matahef, he had this to say— with the authority of someone who has learned, above all, that the museum is never neutral, and that leadership is the art of knowing when to move, and when to wait.
ON POWER & RESPONSIBILITY Museums today are no longer neutral cultural spaces, but public institutions with real social power. How should museum leaders approach that reality? Museums have always made choices – about which artists to work with; which works of art to display; what is acquired; how it is presented – that are fundamentally political decisions. The question is: how do you discharge that responsibility thoughtfully? In politically charged times such as these, museums have a tremendous responsibility to be as thoughtful and objective as they can possibly be, recognizing that they are part of a vibrant civic society in which one of their roles is to provide a space for discussion and debate. The risk is that one can become overly ideological and take a particular stand, as opposed to being conscious of the fact that – at any one moment – there are always going to be multiple positions and opposing points of view. A museum should aspire to be a place that is sufficiently broad and supple in its approach that it can accommodate those different perspectives.
What defines effective museum leadership today? What principles matter most when museums face serious issues? There is huge variation in how institutions function. Generalising is quite difficult but, at least within the United States, my feeling
has always been that you work with your board of trustees. When there are issues that the board has questions about, such as which artists to display, which artists to acquire, or how you are addressing various exhibitions and programmes within the institution, leadership is about bringing people to a point of consensus. What is most important is that you cannot always do everything at once. You have to respond to the moment you are in.
To give you a very concrete example, when I arrived at the Museum of Modern Art, I knew that what I wanted to do was broaden the institution’ s perspective to include and embrace artists from a very different set of geographies and practices than were currently favored in the mid 1990s. If I had tried to do what I ended up doing with the team in 2019 in 1995, it would never have happened; not without real dissension within the staff and among the trustees. It required taking the time to work with people, in order for them to understand that what was going on in other places was just as interesting – and important – as what was happening in Europe or North America. Leadership in that context was recognising that there was going to have to be a trajectory from where we were to where we needed to be, and that was going to take time.
ON GOVERNANCE Governance structures vary widely across institutions; what governance conditions are essential for a museum to function well? I’ ve worked in private institutions, fully public institutions and public private institutions, and there is always this feeling that the
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