Category: Museum Director
Nationality: American
Last Year: 5

Topping three million visitors to the museum in 2010 must have been a personal triumph for Glenn Lowry, who has been MoMA’s director since 1995 and, since that time, has steered the museum towards ever-greater statistical accomplishments. The price of admission to the museum just increased 25 percent (from $20 to $25), which either means that MoMA’s visitor numbers will be down for 2011 or that MoMA’s bottom line will be up. Lowry, and anyone watching his career over the past 16 years, will be banking on the latter. Particularly because in September MoMA opened a big and much-praised retrospective of the work of Willem de Kooning. It’s the kind of show that MoMA was designed, and expanded, and redesigned for. More expansion is on the way, too. This past summer, MoMA bought the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, a bizarre confection built in 2001, which is just two doors down the street.

This wasn’t the only acquisition of the year. The museum doubled down on its holdings of conceptual art with important purchases from the Seth Siegelaub collection and the Brusselsbased Daled Collection. But more importantly, MoMA became the first institution to buy for its permanent collection a complete version of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1986–7), the video that was cynically pulled from an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery late last year because of pressure from conservative activist groups. That’s right, folks, it’s called leadership.