A Vision of Connectivity: Curating the New Museum

As expertly choreographed teams of Museum staff hang paintings, mount textiles, and fill cases with delicate ceramics, the galleries of our new building are coming to life. This marks the culmination of years of curatorial planning—and an opportunity to reflect on the curatorial approaches that have shaped and will continue to shape the Museum’s future. From the earliest stages of this work—when the floor plans were a blank slate and the possibilities were as vast as our globe-spanning collections—we embraced a curatorial philosophy that prioritizes accessibility, intellectual engagement, and the transformative capacities of art to deepen our knowledge of history and our understanding of human experiences.

After five years of collaboration and iteration, every decision, from the rhythm of works on a wall to the integration of contemporary art with ancient sculpture, reflects our belief in the Museum as a site of exchange—where past and present, continuity and innovation, scholarship and personal discovery converge. We have curated the galleries in ways that will welcome visitors not only to experience beauty but also to analyze it; to admire creativity and to contextualize it; to marvel at materials and to complicate their origins. The resulting galleries are thus designed to offer layered encounters with the Museum’s collections—spaces where visitors will experience art through multiple perspectives and with an abiding sense of belonging.

This curatorial vision takes shape across thirty collections galleries and three special exhibition spaces housed within a series of large pavilions that together make up the new Museum building. The installation of each gallery has been guided by a different organizing principle—whether geography, period, artistic medium, thematic inquiry, or sometimes an interplay of these approaches. From the expanse of the pavilion led by European art to the more intimate single-gallery setting dedicated to rotating selections of prints and drawings; from the gallery of ancient Mediterranean art to the modern and contemporary pavilion, which presents global art across all media from 1945 to the present—each space is designed to offer clarity, discovery, and, often, surprise. While overarching frameworks provide coherence, they also create opportunities for cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogues.

Some galleries will reintroduce, in new ways, long-standing strengths of the Museum’s collections. The pavilion dedicated to Asian art highlights our rich holdings in the arts of China, Japan, Korea, and South Asia while remaining attuned to connections across and diversity within cultures. These galleries emphasize points of contact and exchange, whether tracing the transmission of Buddhist art along the Silk Road or exploring the dialogue between classical traditions and modern reinterpretations.

Autumn of Tang Dynasty (唐人秋色), 2008. Ink and color on hemp paper; 70 × 39 × 22 cm. Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. © Pen Wei. Photo: Joseph Hu">

Zoe Kwok, the Nancy and Peter Lee Curator of Asian Art, is installing, for example, Autumn of Tang Dynasty (2008)—a hemp-paper mannequin sculpture by the contemporary Beijing-based artist Peng Wei—alongside selections from the Museum’s extraordinary collection of Chinese painted hanging scrolls to examine representations of the female body across history.

Over the last several years, we have also collaboratively reevaluated the ways in which we define collecting areas and art historical narratives with respect, in particular, to the galleries of American art. Constituted in our old building by art produced largely by Anglo-Americans from the late eighteenth century to 1945 in what is today the contiguous United States, the conception of American art in the new building reflects careful attention to formerly underrepresented groups and encompasses North America and Latin America from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. The galleries bring together a large array of materials—from painting and photography to decorative arts, furniture, and sculpture—thus fostering dialogues between works about how histories of art are inseparable from issues related to the environment, race, gender, and class.

For example, Renée Cox’s large panoramic photograph The Signing (2018) will hang above a Neoclassical sofa with footstools likely produced in Philadelphia around 1830. In the words of the artist, this photograph “flips the script” to “take a revisionist look at Howard  Chandler Christy’s Signing of the Constitution (1940) and replace it with people of color.” As Karl Kusserow, the John Wilmerding Senior Curator of American Art, explains, “Like the pointed disjunction within Cox’s photograph between what is expected and what is portrayed, the placement of her work next to the suite of fine historical furniture will, we hope, prompt viewers to reflect on questions of belonging in America both historically and today.”

The Signing, 2018, printed 2022. Inkjet print; 73 × 213.4 cm, 77.8 × 218.8 × 6.3 cm (frame). Museum purchase, Kathleen Compton Sherrerd Fund for Acquisitions in American Art (2021-38). © Renee Cox">

Other gallery spaces break from the boundaries of collecting areas to pose broader questions about the human experience—such as a gallery dedicated, in its first iteration, to the arts of memory, mourning, and elegy, where seven works spanning five hundred years offer reflections on how varied artistic traditions confront loss. Meanwhile, some areas—like the gallery of African art—have expanded so significantly in scale relative to the old building that both their scope and their capacity for visual and intellectual exploration are transformed.

For the first time, the Museum will feature a dedicated gallery of Latin American art—an area of the collections that has long been a vital resource for teaching. Positioned alongside galleries for American, Native North American, and ancient American art, this space (which complements the presence of Latin American art integrated into many other galleries) explores intersections of tradition, modernity, and identity across time. Textiles, ceramics, prints, and video art converge around an investigation of borders—geographic, cultural, and symbolic.

Francisco Toledo’s tapestry from 1975–76, for example, poetically blurs the line between human and animal, earth and sky, echoing Zapotec worldviews of interconnectedness. Javier Téllez’s video One Flew over the Void (2005) documents a daring performance in which a human cannonball is shot across the US-Mexico border, a powerful meditation on migration and exclusion. Devotional retablos, small painted offerings created by Mexican migrants, provide deeply personal narratives of faith, resilience, and the immigrant experience. Meanwhile, Cecilia Vicuña’s Chanccani Quipu (2012) reinterprets Inka knot-based recordkeeping as a contemporary sculpture, bridging ancestral knowledge with modern poetic expression.

Works on paper are placed at the physical heart of this gallery. Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings Jun Nakamura collaborated with Art and Archaeology Professor Irene Small to curate a thematic installation that draws on the Museum’s holdings of Latin American prints and drawings. “The selected works engage notions of Indigenism that were prevalent among Mexican modernist artists in the 1930s and ’40s and the ways that these artists sought to define a modernist aesthetic rooted in the Indigenous arts of Latin America rather than in a European tradition,” explains Nakamura.

In this gallery and throughout the building, our curatorial strategy is as dynamic as the collections we steward. Galleries are designed to evolve, with works of art regularly reinstalled, new acquisitions reshaping the narratives on display, and visitors challenged to think critically and empathically. This embrace of flux reflects the Museum’s role as a place of teaching and learning, where new research and new encounters continually inform and redefine what it means to curate.

Juliana Ochs Dweck 
Chief Curator