Michelle Kuo, who stepped down last fall as editor-in-chief of Artforum after seven years in the position, has joined the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a curator of painting and sculpture.
“I’m delighted to welcome Michelle to the curatorial team at MoMA,” Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, said in a statement. “She will bring her wide-ranging experience and fresh perspective to the museum at an important moment of new thinking and initiatives.”
“I’m honored to join the museum and take part in its groundbreaking and rigorous program,” Kuo said. “It is incredibly exciting to have the opportunity to collaborate with MoMA’s exceptional team and help shape how we view modern and contemporary art.”
Kuo made her resignation from Artforum public in late October, after allegations of sexual harassment surfaced against one of the magazine’s publishers, Knight Landesman. At the time, she stated, “I resigned because I felt that, in light of the troubling allegations surrounding one of our publishers, I could no longer serve as a public representative of Artforum.” (Landesman has denied the allegations, and a suit filed against the magazine and the former co-publisher by Amanda Schmitt is ongoing.)
The former editor’s curatorial credits include serving as co-curator of “Le Corbusier and the Synthesis of the Arts” at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2004, and as an adviser on “Experiments in Art and Technology” at the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art in Austria in 2016.
Kuo’s move to the museum world follows a similar migration by her predecessor in Artforum’s top job, Tim Griffin, who became director and chief curator of the Kitchen in New York after departing from the magazine in 2011.