Sheena Wagstaff often visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s when she was an art student, seeking refuge among the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the Asian art department. Her appointment in 2012 as the museum’s top curator of modern and contemporary art has given the most overshadowed department in America’s premier museum a program of international exhibitions. Acclaimed celebrities include Kerry James Marshall, Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Lygia Pape, Jack Whitten and Siah Armajani.
Earlier this week, nearly 10 years into her tenure as division president, Wagstaff informed friends and employees via email that she would be leaving her position this summer – after a difficult recovery due to the coronavirus infection has left her behind. She must consider her priorities beyond the museum. .
“I’ve always wanted to work in a polytechnic museum,” Wagstaff, 65, said in an interview, adding, “It was a bittersweet moment. ”
Describing her mission in the email, she said that despite being founded in 1967 by the department now known as Modern and Contemporary Art, the museum “rarely strays from North America and Europe in its chapter. collection or exhibition.”
She changed that. “The vision is to amplify international modernization trends beyond the Western Hemisphere, and significantly rebalance our representation of the most successful artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including great work by female artists and artists of color from around the world and closer to Home.”
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An opportunity to contextualize modern and contemporary art in the same site with an Egyptian coffin and Greek and Roman marbles attracted Wagstaff came to New York from the position of chief curator of Tate Modern in London. Wagstaff, an art historian born in England but raised in the Mediterranean, Germany and Scotland, arrives at the Met during a major transition, as the institution prepares to take over the Marcel Breuer Museum’s building American Art Whitney. Madison Avenue and many of the curatorial divisions are being reorganized.
She has exhibited works from Latin America to North Africa to Southeast Asia, presenting these in conversation with their American counterparts, to expose the global movement of ideas.
Breuer’s labyrinth of modernist galleries became the proof of Wagstaff’s vision. There, she helped create experimental exhibits about Unfinished artworkinvestigative art conspiracy theories and lifelike sculpture. Some critics hail the Met Breuer program as a bold leap forward compared to the strict selections of standard Warhols and Pollocks in the main building while others wish that she will push the envelope further. New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith: “Met Breuer will continue to make brilliant, suspenseful, suspenseful and provocative themed glasses until it suits them.” wrote about her second attempt in this widely fascinating species, “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and Body,” in 2018. (The Breuer closes in 2020)
Wagstaff has been an excellent curator. According to the museum, she oversaw 88 exhibitions, expanding the museum’s collection by 1,400 objects and providing the source for the Met’s annual rooftop art commission that has become a key element in the collection. tourist season of the city. (The upcoming settings by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Halsey, which was recently postponed due to logistical issues.) She’s test-drives the Met commission facade and the Great Hall has been filled with artists like Wangechi Mutu and Kent Monkman.
Wagstaff went public with his plans nearly two months after the museum announced that the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo will design his new $500 million contemporary and contemporary art outfit, a long delay The project seeks to update some of the organization’s most limited galleries. Wagstaff said she hopes that the renovation will be completed within the next seven to eight years.
“Sheena has been a real inspiration as a colleague,” says Max Hollein, museum director, wrote in a letter to the employee. “She constantly challenges herself and others, always with the aim of achieving the best results for the organization together.”
A manager who has worked with Wagstaff says she often takes a no-nonsense approach, trusting that employees can deliver on their commitments. “She’s been very supportive,” said Douglas Eklund, a curator of photography who retired from the Met last year. In 2018 he worked with her department on the exhibition”Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy“Reviewed US conspiracies and politics.
“Subject is like touching a third rail, but she is not afraid,” Eklund added. “I feel strengthened by her.”
Wagstaff says that a highlight of her time at the museum has been working with artists who have proven her hypothesis that modern and contemporary art is best viewed through the lens of history. “Kerry James Marshall keeps surprising me,” Wagstaff offers as an example. “He is someone who has already looked at Rococo, and very few people will even glance at Rococo a second time.”
The curator says she will continue to work in New York City after leaving the museum. She has her next projects already, although she declined to discuss specifics, other than saying she will continue to be involved in the arts.
“I am extremely pleased to be handing the baton to a successor who can build on what has been achieved,” Wagstaff said in closing remarks to employees. “I’ve decided that this is a good time to move on to my next goals.”
