Photo by Robin Holland

Ann Temkin joins the big leagues, becoming the first woman to serve as chief curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA.

   November 2008    Movers+Shakers

Kenny's Back

Perilous Times

New Digs

A Yeasty Scene

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

The museum’s director, Glenn Lowry, interviewed numerous candidates for the post. So Temkin, 48, was no shoo-in, even though she has been a curator in the department since 2003. But to judge from the way Lowry talks about her, he thinks she will be another star. He applauds her “outstanding scholarship, her incredible passion for both modern and contemporary art, her deft touch for installing works of art and her ability to work with people in an institution.”

As an art-history major at Harvard, Temkin discovered that she “liked the connection between art and people” and decided to become a curator. The Connecticut native’s first major exhibition, as a curatorial assistant at MOMA in the 1980s, was based on her Yale doctoral dissertation on the drawings of Joseph Beuys. While co-curating a Constantine Brancusi show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she worked for 13 years between her stints at MOMA , Temkin says she learned to “go past what you’re reading and look at art from square one.” At the PMA , she also organized critically acclaimed retrospectives of Alice Neel, Barnett Newman and Raymond Pettibon.

As coordinator of MOMA’s shows, installations, acquisitions and loans, Temkin wants to achieve “a balance between the permanent collections and special exhibitions.”

Although museums have their “heart in collections,” she notes that “attention gets focused on special exhibitions because they have deadlines.” Like her mentor at the PMA , the late, legendary Anne d’Harnoncourt, Temkin hopes to be both a populist and a specialist in her new and influential position. "A New All Star" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.