Jessica Morgan, the director of the New York-based Dia Art Foundation, has been appointed director of Tate. She replaces Maria Balshaw who stepped down last year; Morgan takes up the post, one of the most coveted in the art world, in January next year, overseeing the Tate Britain and Tate Modern museums as well as sites in Liverpool and St Ives.
Morgan says in a statement: “It is an immense privilege to be asked by the trustees to become the new director. Tate is undoubtedly the world's foremost institution for international modern and contemporary art and for British art, leading the field through its collection and exhibition programme.”
Her appointment comes after a turbulent period at Tate marked by industrial action, staff cuts and decline in footfall in recent years. UK national museums, meanwhile, continue to face ongoing issues around funding, including the government’s decision to “explore options” on introducing admission charges for overseas visitors. Last year, Tate launched a US-style endowment with the aim of raising £150m by 2030.
Morgan joined the Dia Art Foundation as director in early 2015. “At Dia, Morgan is responsible for strengthening and activating all parts of Dia’s multivalent programme, including its pioneering Land art projects, site-specific commissions, and collections and programming across its constellation of twelve sites,” says a Tate statement.
Earlier this year, Morgan told the podcast The Art World: What If…?! about the work environment she has created at Dia, saying: “It is very helpful to be somewhere where you have a sense of purpose in the face of an art world that has become so immense and so unwieldy, and frankly, also so driven by fashion, commerce, and external forces. So I think there's a pride, even, in what we do and there is something tangibly specific about it that I think we can all get behind. And that creates a feeling of unity as well.”
Crucially, she has increased the number of works in the collection by women artists. When Morgan first joined the institution, women artists represented 6.8% of the collection; this proportion how now increased to nearly a third at 29% representation.
Diversifying the collection at Dia has been a priority of Morgan's tenure. Upon the foundation's 50th anniversary in 2024, she told The Art Newspaper: “We were the epitome of a dead-white-male institution [when she joined in 2015]. We inherited a collection with two female artists in it, and the only artist of colour we could point to was On Kawara.
“The last few years have seen a very deliberate effort to bring into our midst artists who were rightfully part of that [1960s and 70s] history but who were written out,“ she added. ”So it was about restoring history, and then beginning to look more globally, beyond just the US and Europe.”
Morgan has also curated major exhibitions internationally. Recent examples include the group show Minimal at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris last year, and a Lee Ufan retrospective in Venice, on through November at SMAC San Marco Art Centre.
Morgan holds degrees in art history at Cambridge University and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, graduating in the early 1990s. As a teenager through her early twenties, she manned the reception at the Groucho club, the infamous private venue in the heart of Soho in London which became the hub for Young British Artists (YBAs). When asked about the YBAs, she told The Gentlewoman in an interview last year: “I found it cynical. What it was saying about English culture and society felt like it was taking us in a direction I was not excited about.”
Following fellowships at the Yale Centre for British Art and at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, she took up the post of assistant curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, later becoming chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 1998.
In 2002, Morgan returned to the UK for a curatorial role at Tate Modern, becoming Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern from 2010 through 2014. According to The Gentlewoman profile, “armed with an American unflappability about asking rich people for money, Jessica proved there that she is one of the great collection-builders of our time.” Morgan subsequently co-founded acquisition committees for the regions of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia at Tate.
Morgan was the artistic director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014, before her directorship of Dia commenced the following year. She also serves on advisory committees for several museums and cultural organisations across Europe and Asia.
The British artist Cornelia Parker calls Morgan's appointment “great news”. ”She gave me my first one-person exhibition in America at the Boston ICA in 2000, contacting me before she had even started her job as curator there,” Parker says. ”She has experience, ambition, flair and daring, attributes which I’m sure she will put to good use in her new role."
Turner prize winner Steve McQueen also praised the directorship announcement. He says: “I greatly admire Jessica; the way she strives to achieve the best for the artists she works with, her knowledge and belief in excellence are so impressive.”
