The New Museum has promoted Massimiliano Gioni, its artistic director since 2014, to the post of Toby Devan Lewis Director, the museum announced in early July 2026, with the appointment reported on July 8, 2026. Gioni succeeds Lisa Phillips, who retired as director in April 2026 after twenty-six years, and becomes the New Museum director at a moment when the institution has doubled its gallery space.
Gioni joined the New Museum in 2010 and has organized or co-organized more than 100 exhibitions there, among them surveys that introduced many artists to New York museum audiences; earlier in his career he founded a small New York gallery devoted to artist projects. The museum credited him with building the exhibition program that has defined the institution's last decade and a half.
The transition lands at a structural turning point. The museum reopened its expanded OMA-designed building at 235 Bowery on March 21, 2026, and the fall 2026 program Gioni assembled — announced June 8, 2026 and headed by the Arthur Jafa survey I Am Tony — will now be carried out under his own directorship rather than handed to a successor's.
Gioni's appointment is the largest of the summer's leadership moves but not the only one. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum named Melissa Chiu, director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden since 2014, as its next director in April 2026; she takes up the post on September 1, 2026, appointed by Mariët Westermann, the Guggenheim Foundation's director and chief executive.
For the city's art public, the significance is structural: the New Museum has chosen to concentrate artistic and executive authority in one person at the precise moment most large institutions separate the two — a bet on curatorial judgment as management. And with Phillips curating the fall's Bowery history exhibition as director emerita, the museum has arranged its own handover as subject matter: the coming season will display the institution's past in its galleries while its new leadership takes the controls.
For more context, read New Museum fall 2026 season leans on an Arthur Jafa survey.
For more context, read greater new york 2026.
For more context, read How a public artwork gets commissioned in New York.