Ann Temkin to Step Down as MoMA’s Chief Painting and Sculpture Curator After 18 Years

Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture for 18 years, will retire from the role in January 2027, the museum announced Monday. She will, however, continue to shape the New York institution’s programming, taking on a newly created position as an adviser to the director, Christophe Cherix, ahead of the museum’s centennial in 2029.

Temkin joined MoMA in 2003 as a curator of painting and sculpture and was promoted to head of the department in 2008, becoming the first woman to hold the position. Her tenure marked a major departure from the curatorial approach established at the museum by her predecessor, William S. Rubin, who shaped its presentation of modern art throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Where Rubin organized modern art according to a sequential progression of movements and periods, Temkin and her team introduced a more porous approach to curation, breaking down boundaries between mediums that had once been treated as so distinct that they were assigned separate curators.

That curatorial shift was reflected institutionally in 2009 with the creation of C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), a cross-departmental research program that studies art histories beyond North America and Western Europe and has helped expand the canon of modern and contemporary art.

The expansive approach envisioned by Temkin took more literal shape a decade later, when MoMA’s highly anticipated new building opened with reconfigured galleries that placed canonical works such as Pablo Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon alongside Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die from 1967. By resisting the siloing of art by geography and chronology, the rehang interrogated the style and substance of European modernism, as well as the ways later generations of artists reclaimed those histories.

The critical reception of the rehang was complicated. Jill Steinhauer, writing in The Art Newspaper, described the renovated MoMA as “a much more interesting institution,” while nonetheless highlighting the relative absence of India’s Progressive Artists’ Group, Arab modernists, and African American abstractionists. Sebastian Smee, in his Boston Globe review, similarly acknowledged the museum’s effort to broaden its narrative, but wrote that it “works hard to be cross-cultural” even as some of its experiments felt “labored and tokenistic.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Temkin offered her account of the conceptual overhaul, describing it as “liberating, exhilarating.”

She objected to the language of “gaps” in MoMA’s collection because it suggested that art history was a “complete puzzle” that could eventually be solved by acquiring every missing piece. “Right now,” she explained, “we are saying, ‘No, we don’t know—there is no way of knowing some complete art history.’”

Temkin also curated dozens of exhibitions during her tenure, several of which offered fresh perspectives on familiar names in art history. Judd,” which opened on the unfortunate eve of COVID-19 in 2020, was the first major US retrospective of Donald Judd in more than three decades. Billed by MoMA as a chronicle of the “full evolution” of Judd’s practice, the exhibition traced his development from rare early paintings through his modular sculptural breakthroughs. This was followed by “Matisse: The Red Studio” in 2022, which, in a rare move, centered a single work within the painter’s famous oeuvre, contextualizing its creation through Matisse’s relationship to his studio.

“Duchamp,” which opened this April, was five years in the making and the first US retrospective of Duchamp since 1973. Co-curated with Michelle Kuo and Matthew Affron, the roughly 300-work exhibition was framed by MoMA as an effort to unpack the “myths and misconceptions” that saddled the artist over time. Critics praised its comprehensive account of Duchamp’s practice, which extended beyond his conceptual signatures, while others questioned whether its very premise risked sanitizing an artist whose work was defined by its subversion of institutional authority.

Critics aside, the exhibition was a hit: “Duchamp” drew more than 611,000 visitors, making it MoMA’s highest-attended exhibition of 2026—a soaring note on which to end Temkin’s tenure. The story comes neatly full circle in October, when “Duchamp” travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Temkin began her curatorial career and, in 2002, organized a survey of Barnett Newman’s paintings.

In a statement, director Christophe Cherix said that MoMA would immediately launch a search for Temkin’s successor. The announcement also raised questions about MoMA’s long-standing policy requiring senior staff to retire at 65, as Temkin will be 67 when she steps down in January. A museum spokesperson told the New York Times that “in certain circumstances in the past, the board has extended the tenure of some individuals beyond retirement age.”

In her own statement, Temkin described her upcoming move into a strategic advisory role as a “great delight.” Looking ahead to the museum’s centennial, she said it would be “an opportunity to look ahead and open our imaginations to the future,” as MoMA embraces “the next phase of the Museum’s continual transformation.”