Sheena Wagstaff to Depart Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sheena Wagstaff, since 2012 the chair of the division of recent and up to date artwork on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York, is leaving the establishment this summer season, the New York Times reviews. Wagstaff is broadly credited with elevating the profile of her division throughout her almost decadelong tenure on the Met and altering the general public notion of the establishment. Lengthy dominated by a Eurocentric worldview and beforehand not recognized for exhibiting cutting-edge artwork, below Wagstaff’s steerage the museum lately has hosted broadly lauded reveals of artists together with Siah Armajani, Kerry James Marshall, Lygia Pape, Gerhard Richter, and Jack Whitten.
“The imaginative and prescient was to amplify worldwide modernisms past the Western Hemisphere, and to considerably rebalance our illustration of essentially the most consequential artists of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, together with main works by ladies artists, and by artists of coloration from internationally and nearer to dwelling,” Wagstaff advised the Instances.
Arriving to the Met from London’s Tate Fashionable, the place she had been chief curator since 2001, Wagstaff organized eighty-eight exhibitions and shepherded the division’s acquisition of fourteen hundred objects. In 2013, she inaugurated the Met’s annual rooftop backyard fee collection: That includes works by artists together with Héctor Zamora, Alicja Kwade, and Huma Bhabha, the collection has been a summer season spotlight and a serious attendance booster. In 2019, she originated the Met façade and Nice Corridor commissions, the inaugural version of the previous that includes a collection of bronze sculptures by Wangechi Mutu and the latter comprising two monumental work by Ken Monkman.
In a letter to workers, museum director Max Hollein praised Wagstaff. “Sheena has been a real inspiration as a colleague,” he wrote. “She repeatedly challenges herself and others, all the time with the aim of collectively attaining the very best consequence for the establishment.”
Wagstaff, who will stay in New York and can proceed to work within the arts, chalked up her departure to an extended restoration from Covid-19 which pressured her to reexamine her priorities. She leaves simply because the museum begins a $500 million renovation of the trendy and up to date artwork wing, to be designed by Mexico Metropolis–primarily based architect Frida Escobedo and anticipated to take a minimum of seven years to finish.
“I take immense pleasure in handing over the baton to a successor who can construct on what has been achieved,” Wagstaff advised her workers in an e-mail. “I’ve resolved that this can be a good juncture to maneuver on to my subsequent set of targets.”
