MoMA’s Thomas J. Lax Wins the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement

Thomas J. Lax, an associate curator in MoMA’s department of media and performance art, has won the seventh Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. The award, which is conferred every two years, comes with a stipend of $20,000, and asks the winner to deliver a public lecture at the Menil Collection.

Lax is also a faculty member at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in performance at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, is on the advisory committee of the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics and the arts advisory committee of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Before MoMA, he spent seven years at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he helped organize “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” among other shows.

The award, managed by the Menil Foundation, is selected by a panel of senior curators, and is named for the late, celebrated curator who worked Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Yves Klein.