After months of whispers, dossiers, and deliberation in the rarefied air of Manhattan’s cultural aristocracy, the Museum of Modern Art has announced its next director: Christophe Cherix. A Swiss-born curator with a flair for both rigor and reverie, Cherix steps into the role following Glenn Lowry’s thirty-year reign—a tenure so long it practically fossilized into the building’s steel beams.

But Cherix isn’t just an institutional insider. He’s a scholar of paper and ink, an advocate for radical voices, and a quiet power who has helped shape MoMA’s identity from the wings. Now, at center stage, he’s not merely filling shoes—he’s rethreading the narrative.

The Era of the Inward Turn

Cherix’s appointment comes at a moment when modern art museums face a strange contradiction: louder audiences, quieter authority. The demand to diversify, to decolonize, to digitize, to democratize—all hum at once, and directors are no longer just caretakers of collections; they’re diplomats, strategists, cultural cartographers.

So who better than someone fluent in nuance? Cherix isn’t a media darling or a branding guru. He’s a curator’s curator. As Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, he mounted exhibitions that gave Ed Ruscha’s roadside Americana fresh menace and showcased the metaphysical electricity of Betye Saar’s assemblages. He lent platform to Adrian Piper’s conceptual rigor without neutering its sting. He’s made space for artists who ask difficult questions in soft, enduring tones.

What Makes a MoMA Director Now?

Gone are the days when museum directors could preside like benevolent monarchs. Today’s leaders must be many things: shepherds of labor equity, stewards of the climate crisis, defenders of free expression, and yes, fundraisers with the charisma of a Broadway lead.

Board Chair Marie-Josée Kravis called Cherix’s curatorial leadership “brilliant,” and his stewardship “steady”—words that, on paper, may seem sedate, but in the context of MoMA’s high-stakes ambitions, translate to essential. The institution is shifting—not violently, not theatrically—but with the tectonic patience of someone adjusting to new gravity.

Cherix’s response? A promise to champion the staff.

MoMA has long been a leader in embracing new forms of expression, amplifying the voices of artists from around the globe, and engaging the broadest audiences onsite.

– He said in a statement that was, characteristically, elegant and unadorned.

Wifredo Lam and the Spirit of the Shift

Before Cherix assumes full directorship this September, he’ll co-curate a major retrospective of Wifredo Lam, the Cuban-born modernist whose oeuvre is a visual séance of Afro-Caribbean spirituality, surrealist form, and anticolonial defiance. Slated to run from November 2025 to March 2026, the show signals a direction: outward in scope, inward in purpose.

Lam is no safe pick. He is a storm of hybridity and resistance—a fitting echo for a museum poised to reflect not merely the West’s avant-garde, but the world’s plural modernities. It’s a curatorial decision that feels not like punctuation, but prelude.

A Future Written in Pencil and Ink

Cherix’s background at Geneva’s Cabinet des Estampes might read like humble origin, but there’s something poetically fitting in his medium of choice. Prints and drawings are materials of the in-between—drafts, gestures, traces. They’re closer to thought than spectacle. And that’s where Cherix thrives: in the careful margins where museum decisions are made not for headlines, but for legacy.

As MoMA moves toward its next chapter, it does so under the guidance of someone who has, for over 15 years, studied the institution from within. Not with complacency, but with precision. Not with fanfare, but with form.

The show, as always, must go on. But under Cherix, it may very well slow down, look inward, and ask better questions.