The Bronx Museum of the Arts has named Shamim M. Momin as its subsequent director and chief curator. She is going to start within the position in early September, succeeding Klaudio Rodriguez, who departed the museum final September to steer the Museum of Tremendous Arts, St. Petersburg in Florida.
Momin was most not too long ago the director of curatorial affairs on the Henry Artwork Gallery in Seattle, the place she labored from 2018 to 2024. Throughout her tenure, she curated the group exhibition “In Plain Sight,” which checked out artists who practices deal with histories sometimes hidden from the general public, and oversaw commissions by Tala Madani, Gary Simmons, Kelly Akashi, Hank Willis Thomas, Donna Huanca, Diana Al-Hadid, and others.
In 2009, she cofounded LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), an LA-based nonprofit targeted on site-specific public artwork commissions. Between its founding and her departure in 2018, she curated greater than 100 commissions from greater than 300 artists. Beforehand, she was an affiliate curator on the Whitney Museum and the department director of its Midtown outpost, the now closed Whitney Museum at Altria, the place she organized greater than 50 tasks. She additionally co-curated the 2004 and 2008 editions of the Whitney Biennial.
In an interview, Momin mentioned she was serious about taking the directorship as a result of she sees the Bronx Museum as “a museum that’s so aligned with the observe and values that I consider most in. The Bronx Museum has been a paradigmatic establishment, supporting the variety of artists, the richness of its group, the connection to its group, and the flexibility to make artwork accessible to all, in addition to offering artists, who could not have had as foregrounded an area within the within the central narrative, an area to discover their concepts.”
The Bronx Museum is present process a $42.9 million renovation and enlargement that’s scheduled to open subsequent yr. Discovering a director who may navigate its completion and suppose via the way forward for the museum was a precedence for the board’s nine-member search committee, mentioned Joseph Mizzi, the museum’s board chair, who led that group.
“We’re figuratively and actually in enlargement mode, so we see Shamim as anyone who can take what we’ve been doing and do it extra expansively,” Mizzi mentioned.
Momin mentioned she was trying ahead “to what may be executed with that new constructing on this world at the moment” throughout “actually transformative second” for the museum. The brand new constructing, she mentioned, offers the Bronx Museum with the chance “to have a higher place within the cultural panorama in presence and influence and identification” through the mix of exhibition and public applications it may possibly provide throughout its elevated footprint.
Whereas Momin didn’t talk about specifics about her imaginative and prescient for the Bronx Museum, she mentioned that her expertise working in Los Angeles and Seattle “to construct group, and organizational outreach and presence in desirous about very totally different constituencies and communities” will inform her “perspective for a way we transfer ahead with the Bronx Museum, respecting and deeply committing to the area people itself.”
By the use of instance, she pointed to the exhibitions she organized at LAND, which “permit[ed] artists to develop and understand concepts that weren’t comfy within the museum house.” However extra importantly, she mentioned, the purpose of that group was to supply “what all communities deserve: the entry to difficult, thrilling up to date artwork of their day-to-day life that got here with out the boundaries to entry of a museum or a gallery.”
Momin’s position additionally consists of the title of chief curator, which she mentioned permits her to assist form the “imaginative and prescient, values, content material that the establishment helps” in its programming along with its general strategic objectives. She added, “If you happen to’re going to be working with artists who’re talking, let’s say, about labor, equality, or range, it is advisable be talking for from a place from a real stance for the museum itself can also be talking from these values.”
Momin takes over the Bronx Museum, which has $3.9 million annual working funds, throughout a difficult second for the humanities and museums, that are below assault from the Trump administration.
“I really feel that’s when it’s a must to step up essentially the most,” she mentioned. “That’s the place my duty lies, particularly when the issues I consider in most—nonprofit establishments, dedication to public service, and creating an area for artwork to be out there to the total public—are threatened. With ardour and alignment, we will proceed to help that even in face of different adjustments which are occurring.”
