Longtime New Museum Director Lisa Phillips to Depart
99Sept. 30, 2025
Lisa Phillips, who has served as director of New York’sNew Museumsince 1999, isretiringafter twenty-six years in the role. An early and tireless champion of emerging technologies and experimental art forms, Phillips is the second person to lead the museum, after founding director Marcia Tucker, whom she succeeded. She will step down in April 2026, when her contract expires, becoming director emeritus. The museum has said it will begin a search for her replacement this month.
Phillips conceived and realized the New Museum’s first dedicated building, at 235 Bowery, designed by architecture firm SANAA, as well as its $82 million expansion into neighboring 231 Bowery. Designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, the new building will double the noncollecting institution’s exhibition space and is expected to open later this year. During Phillips’s time at the New Museum, annual attendance grew tenfold, from 45,000 to 450,000 visitors, with the board and staff significantly expanding as well, the former increasing from twelve members to fifty and the latter from twenty-five to 150.
Under Phillips, the institution’s leadership, team, and audience all became more diverse. She oversaw more than two hundred exhibitions, among them those by George Condo, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Jeffrey Gibson, Sarah Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, Adrian Piper, and Faith Ringgold. In 1999, she established the Media Lounge, the first new media space in an American museum, welcoming Rhizome as affiliate-in-residence in 2002. Seven years later, she inaugurated the New Museum Triennial, which centers work by young and emerging artists. Among the other initiatives she introduced are Museum as Hub, IdeasCity, and NEW INC, the first-ever museum-led cultural incubator, which fosters collaborative innovation among the fields of art, design, science, technology, and new media.
Phillips’s tenure was not without controversy, as evinced by the tumultuous 2019 negotiations between leadership and unionizing staff, who complained of poor work conditions and low pay. “We were really not prepared,” Phillips told the New York Times. “At first, I felt that it was antithetical to the culture of the museum. But then I began to see that this is very much a new generation speaking, and we needed to listen.”
Phillips told the Times that she timed the conclusion of her tenure to roughly coincide with the opening of the museum’s new building. Recalling conversations she’d had with Tucker on her own retirement, Phillips recounted a stark bit of advice her predecessor had given her: “Don’t die at your desk.”