[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Jessica-Morgan-photo-by-Gabriela-Herman.jpeg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter more than a decade of leading the Dia Art Foundation, Jessica Morgan will return to the Tate museum network, this time as its director. She will start January 1, 2027.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn that new role, she will oversee one of England\u2019s most important art institutions. Tate facilitates two major London museums\u2014Tate Modern and Tate Britain\u2014as well as institutions in Liverpool and St. Ives.<\/p>\n
\n\tShe fills a role left vacant by Maria Balshaw, who departed Tate at the end of 2025, during a period of prolonged scrutiny. The network had recently released a report that showed that it was operating at a loss. Meanwhile, Tate had also recently made cuts to its staff, leading 150 workers to go on strike.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe new role is effectively a homecoming for Morgan, who was formerly a curator of international art at Tate Modern before becoming director of Dia in 2015. Her programming for Tate roundly drew acclaim, most notably for her 2015 exhibition \u201cThe World Goes Pop,\u201d which has been credited with internationalizing the history of Pop art. She also organized widely praised retrospectives for Saloua Raouda Choucair, Gabriel Orozco, and others.<\/p>\n
\n\tHer leadership of Dia, a foundation that runs spaces in New York, Beacon, and Bridgehampton, as well as an array of offsite Land art installations across the nation, has continued an emphasis on global art history that could be found in her Tate programming.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cJessica is an exceptional leader and a deeply respected figure across the sector,\u201d Tate chairman Roland Rudd said in a statement. \u201cHer visionary revitalisation of Dia Art Foundation, as well as her prior experience at Tate and her many years working with artists and institutions around the world, make her the ideal person to lead Tate into a new era.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tOften considered one of the go-to institutions for Minimalist, Land, and Conceptual art of the 1960s and \u201970s, Dia has a collection that has historically skewed white, male, and American and European. Morgan expanded its focus to include a range of artists who had yet to receive canonization. Among those whose work Dia acquired under Morgan are Sam Gilliam, Tehching Hsieh, Senga Nengudi, Meg Webster, Ren\u00e9e Green, Lee Ufan, and Cameron Rowland. Exhibitions mounted under her tenure, like those for Delcy Morelos and Carl Craig, engaged with Dia\u2019s history in compelling and unexpected ways. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI greatly admire Jessica\u2014the way she strives to achieve the best for the artists she works with, her knowledge and belief in excellence are so impressive,\u201d said Steve McQueen, who had a 2024\u201325 solo show at Dia Chelsea. \u201cThe future looks bright with her at the helm.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn a 2022 Artnet News<\/em> essay, Morgan noted that Dia\u2019s purview was \u201cpartial to say the least\u201d and she said the foundation had made great strides in expanding its offerings. \u201cFocusing on supporting artists where there is real need for institutional funding has led us to the work of exceptional figures, many of whom have no gallery representation,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n \n\tShe also oversaw Dia as it doubled down on Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood it helped make it to the gallery district that it is today. In 2021, the foundation remodeled and expanded its spaces there. At the same time, Dia also introduced free admission for its Chelsea galleries. <\/p>\n \n\tThe expansion was lauded by critics such as Roberta Smith, who wrote, in the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cIn the city that never sleeps, the Dia Art Foundation seems, after a hiatus, fully awake.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMorgan\u2019s lauded leadership of Dia led many to speculate that she was being considered for the directorship of another New York institution, the Museum of Modern Art, though that position ultimately went to Christophe Cherix.<\/p>\n \n\tWriting in Vulture<\/em>, journalist Rachel Corbett called the appointment \u201ca move so safe almost no one saw it coming.\u201d In her piece, Corbett also reported that Morgan was in contention for MoMA\u2019s top job \u201cuntil the very end,\u201d with a source telling Corbett that Morgan had been told, \u201cin the words of the source, that the board had \u2018decreased their tolerance for risk\u2019 since her last interview\u201d days before Cherix\u2019s appointment was announced. That source also said that Morgan had been told she had been \u201cdisqualified because she lacked experience leading a large-scale institution.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn a statement about joining Tate, Morgan said, \u201cTate is undoubtedly the world\u2019s foremost institution for international modern and contemporary art and for British art, leading the field through its collection and exhibition programme. My time as a curator at Tate deeply informed my work in the last eleven years steering Dia Art Foundation, with artists and our public always at the centre of what we do. I look forward to this pivotal next stage at Tate, and most importantly, continuing and advancing the incredible work of Tate\u2019s committed and talented team in the years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/jessica-morgan-tate-director-leaves-dia-art-foundation-1234787925\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Jessica-Morgan-photo-by-Gabriela-Herman.jpeg?w=1024″] After more than a decade of leading the Dia Art Foundation, Jessica Morgan will return to the Tate museum network, this time as its director. She will start January 1, 2027. In that new role, she will oversee one of England\u2019s most important art institutions. Tate facilitates two major London museums\u2014Tate Modern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2058864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2058864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2058864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2058864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2058864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}