After 26 years as director of the New Museum, Lisa Phillips will step down from her role in April 2026, the Lower Manhattan institution announced yesterday, September 25.
The news, shared in a press release stating that Phillips will “retire from the Museum” at the end of her contract, comes on the cusp of the New Museum’s anticipated reopening this fall after a major $82 million expansion and a nearly year-long closure to the public. While the institution has still not set a date for the reopening, it is projected for the end of this year, museum officials told the New York Times. According to the museum’s announcement, the search for its next director will begin this month.
Phillips told Hyperallergic in a statement that her departure was “not an easy decision,” but comes at a “natural transition point” following the museum’s reopening.
“After much thought and consideration, I have decided that it will then be the right time for me to step down after 26 years at the helm and pass the baton to the next generation of leaders who will chart the course of this next chapter,” Phillips said.
Phillips’s tenure has been marked by significant transformation and bitter labor controversy at the storied contemporary arts institution. Her leadership began in 1999 when she left her longtime curatorial role at the Whitney Museum of American Art to take the reins from the New Museum’s late founder, Marcia Tucker. Under her direction, the institution grew from an experimental arts organization with temporary locations and a staff of 25 people into a monolithic museum in the Lower East Side’s Bowery with approximately 450,000 visitors a year and a 150-person staff. Over the last two and a half decades, Phillips has overseen more than 200 exhibitions, including solo shows for Simone Leigh, Jeffrey Gibson, Faith Ringgold, and Wangechi Mutu, and launched the New Museum Triennial, dedicated to international early-career artists.
Phillips’s leadership has also been marked by a series of labor controversies, particularly in recent years, as unionized staff accused management of poor working conditions, unfair labor practices, and stalled contract negotiations.
Workers have also scrutinized the pay disparities between staff and executive leadership. (According to the museum’s 2024 tax filings, Phillips’s compensation totaled nearly $900,000.) The dispute peaked during the 2020 pandemic, when the museum laid off 18 full- and part-time staff, including members of the union’s bargaining unit, citing revenue losses despite receiving a Paycheck Protection Program loan of $1–2 million. In response, the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that the museum had deliberately targeted union supporters in its staff reductions. (The New Museum refuted the claim at the time, telling Hyperallergic that they “[did not] believe this charge has merit.”)
In response to Hyperallergic’s inquiry about Phillips’s departure and the museum’s search for a new director, a spokesperson for Local 2110 UAW, which represents the New Museum Union, said that they “look forward to developing a good collective bargaining relationship with the new Museum leadership and to negotiating further improvements to the union membership’s working conditions and economic status.”
The announcement of Phillips’s forthcoming departure comes amid leadership changes at major museums in the city. This month, Shamim M. Momin, co-founder of the nonprofit Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), began her new post as director of the Bronx Museum. Meanwhile, Christophe Cherix, the previous chief curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art, has started his new role as the institution’s seventh director after Glenn Lowry’s departure last year.