“Mia is a very engaged and research-driven curator who works closely with artists and is interested in how museums can reach out and address issues of social justice, environmental justice, the urgent questions of our time,” said Biesenbach, who has run the institution for six months after a long tenure at MoMA PS1. “For us this was very important.”
Locks had worked at MOCA once before, starting her career there as a curatorial assistant in 2010 before joining MoMA PS1 in 2013, where she was an assistant curator. In 2015, she was one of four curators to organize “Greater New York” for that museum. In 2017, as an independent curator working in New York, she teamed up with Christopher Y. Lew to organize the Whitney Biennial, which was acclaimed for its formal and racial diversity but also attacked for its inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till.
Biesenbach praised her handling of the controversy. “She’s a great mediator, a great communicator,” he said. “I thought she did a good job of keeping conversation going and supporting both sides.”
Locks will join two other senior-level curatorial staff members at the museum: Bennett Simpson, who has been promoted to senior curator and administrative head, and Amanda Hunt, who now has the dual roles of director of education and senior curator of programs.
Their work is already reflected in the museum’s exhibition schedule for the next two years, which has just been released. Most notably, Simpson is the curator of a 25-year retrospective of painter Henry Taylor, celebrated for unpredictable and unfussy portraits from black urban life. Set to open by the end of 2020, the show may travel afterward. “We have just reached out to other museums,” Biesenbach said.
Other confirmed exhibitions include a retrospective of the wildly expressive Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist opening in spring 2020 and a show of the often-satiric drawings, paintings and animations of Tala Madani, a Los Angeles-based artist born in Tehran, opening that fall.
The hiring of Locks signals that Biesenbach is not appointing a chief curator. “Not for now,” anyway, he said, noting that he expects a team approach to invite more collaboration inside and outside the museum.
He also sees it as a return to the early strengths of the museum. “When I took this job I met with some of MOCA’s founders,” he said, singling out one conversation he had with the museum’s longest-serving director, Richard Koshalek. “It became clear to me that having a multiplicity of viewpoints and voices was so important to MOCA’s history. We’re trying to re-establish that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.