Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

I was saddened to hear that Sheena Wagstaff stepped down as Leonard A. Lauder Chair of Modern & Contemporary Art at The Met (TM) last week. At least it was, apparently, by her choice, after a battle with long covid¹.

Among many highlights I list below, perhaps this was THE highlight of Sheena Wagstaff’s tenure at The Met- The Met Breuer’s lobby seen on the day it opened, Met Member’s Preview, March 8, 2016, 10 days before it opened to the public, with banners for the now legendary shows it opened with.

There is no other person I have singled out for praise in the NYC Art world over the 7 years of NHNYC.com more than I have Sheena Wagstaff. Appointed January 10, 2012, in 2016, I called her the “Person of the Year” in NYC Art. Over her decade at the helm of M & C, she mounted quite a few memorable shows, a number of important shows, and some that are now legendary, at The Met Breuer, and at the 1000 Fifth Avenue Mothership. 

As it turns out, I was there on The Met Breuer’s Opening Day in March, 2016 and it’s closing day in March, 2020, and wrote about both.

The Met Breuer was established to be The Met’s “Modern &. Contemporary outpost” while the M & C wing at 1000 Fifth Avenue was undergoing renovations. Due to the economic situation the renovation was cancelled. The Met Breuer went on for 4 years, about half the originally announced duration, until The Met made a deal with The Frick to take over their Breuer Building lease. After TMB, Sheena Wagstaff continued mounting shows at 1000 Fifth Avenue, including more major & memorable shows. As I write this, two of her shows are up, and maybe there will be more that have already been in the works to come.

In her honor, I revisit some of the memorable shows I’ve seen with links to those I’ve written about, mounted during Sheena Wagstaff’s tenure at The Met-

Opening The Met Breuer–

The Artist seen on an iPad at the show.

Nasreen Mohamedi and here. To this day, the only show I’ve written about twice.

“Welcome to the future,” I captioned this Photo in the piece. Unfinished on Opening Day of The Met Breuer. Member’s Preview, March 8, 2016

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible – Along with Nasreen Mohamedi, the two shows that opened The Met Breuer, March, 2016.

diane arbus in the beginning, 2016 – A brilliant installation of Ms. Arbus’s little known early work, included a Portrait of my late friend, Storme DeLaverie, that she told me Ms. Arbus took, but I’d never seen.

Lygia Pape, Tetia 1, C, 1976-2004, Golden thread, nails, wood, lighting, a work that wonderfully characterized the ephemeral nature of Ms. Pape’s work in a show remembered for its endless variety and surprise. Seen at Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, her first major show in a US museum in June, 2017.

Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, 2017

Having one of the biggest jobs in the entire Art world, I can’t begin to imagine how busy Sheena Wagstaff was. But, here she is looking at a very large work by Ursula von Rydingsvard at Galerie Lelong & Co., April, 2018. She still took the time to make the rounds of the galleries and see shows, as I came across her doing, as I was, here.

NYC Art Shows, 2016: Sheena Wagstaff Rules The Waves – My look at Art in NYC in 2016.

The opening galley of Mastry.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry , 2017- Perhaps the most important show mounted during the run of the The Met Breuer.

Marsden Hartley, Smelt Brook Falls, 1937

Marsden Hartley”s Maine, 2017– A somewhat mythical Artist got an overdue close look.

Installation view of the first gallery.

Jack Whitten: Odyssey, 2018 – Jack Whitten lived, worked and died without anyone knowing he had ALSO created a large body of Sculpture. And, it was every bit as compelling as his wonderful Painting.

Delirious: Art At The Limit Of Reason, 2017

Edvard Munch: Between the Clock & the Bed 2017 – In my view, though not large, a brilliant show.

Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy, 2018

The crowd in the packed first galley struggling to see the blockbuster David Hockney show 2 days before it closed, February 23, 2018.

David Hockney, 2018. Back over at 1000 Fifth Avenue, it still boggles my mind that it was only one of FIVE major shows up at The Met at the same time. Four of them within feet of each other with the once-in-a-lifetime Michelangelo: Divine Designer & Draftsman right behind that rear wall seen above.

The under-known Thornton Dial, 1928-2016, had a few pieces in it, including History Refused to Die, 2004, center.

History Refused to Die: Hightlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift, 2018, at 1000 Fifth Avenue. What a great, small, show this was!

Very, very few got to see this. Seen here on its very last day, March 12, 2020. Installation view of the lobby on the 4th floor.

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, 2020- A brilliantly selected, concise, overview of his long and productive career, which I saw on its last day, the final day The Met Breuer was open.

Home is a Foreign Place, one of the 3 shows that closed TMB, drawn from recent additions to the Permanent Collection showed how far The Met’s collection of M&C has come. Seen on its final day- March 12, 2020.

Home Is A Foreign Place, 2020. The last show I saw at The Met Breuer, which I saw after seeing the Richter show.

The Met Breuer closed, permanently as it turned out, right after I left the Richter show. My look back at it is here and here.

Standing in the covid line, keeping my distance, waiting to be allowed in. Still, it was just so great to be back home again, and it was well worth the inconveniences.

Alice Neel: People Come First, 2021- The first Met blockbuster after it reopened, I saw it as The Met’s love letter to the people of NYC.Epic Abstraction, 2018- Date – A show that’s been up for quite a while and has evolved over its run. Still as compelling in 2022 as it was when it opened.

Louise Bourgeois: Paintings, 2022 – Absolutely terrific. Nothing short of a revelation.

And there were the Roof Garden Commissions by-

Alex Da Corte 2021

Hector Zamora 2020

Alicja Kwade 2019

Huma Bhabha 2018

Adrian Villar Rojas 2017

Cornelia Parker 2016

Pierre Huyghe 2015

Imran Qureshi 2013

Dan Graham 2014

And the Facade Commissions-

Carol Bove 2021

Wangechi Mutu 2020

Before she came to The Met, Sheena Wagstaff was chief curator of the Tate, London. During her time there she mounted a wonderful Edward Hopper show that’s only known to us on this side of the pond through the fine catalog she edited for the show. I hoped she would give us a Hopper show, which didn’t happen. But, when she reinstalled The Met’s M&C galleries she gave Hopper’s The Lighthouse at Two Lights, 1929, pride of place. This was a marvelous choice, in my view, serving as a reminder of a work that has been a bit forgotten after becoming iconic and appearing on a US Postage Stamp in 1970,  Seen in 2018. The galleries have been rehung since.

Along with ALL of this, Sheena Wagstaff oversaw the reinstallation of the M & C galleries at 1000 Fifth Avenue, next to the installation of two galleries devoted to Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today murals and associated works (to the right of the Hopper in the Photo above) which The Met received as a gift shortly after Sheena came on board.

The late Sam Giliiam, 1933-2022, gifted this work, Carousel State, 1968, to The Met in 2018. He was honored by The Museum in 2017. Seen in Epic Abstraction in its current inkcaratnion, July, 2, 2022.

Currently, there are  two shows up as I write this Ms. Wagstaff was involved with- Epic Abstraction and Louise Bourgeois: Paintings. Both are excellent, the Bourgeois, a revelation. There may be more coming along that she was involved with, in addition to the Hew Locke: Gilt Facade Commission scheduled to open in September. 

Sheena Wagstaff before she spoke at the Nasreen Mohamedi Symposium at The Met in 2016. Right after she did, she happened to sit next to me.

I met Ms. Wagstaff, once, when she happened to sit down next to me at the Nasreen Mohamedi Symposium at The Met in 2016. Such was her passion for Nasreen, I learned in the show, that she traveled to India and visited places where Nasreen lived and sought out the site of her unmarked grave. After the symposium ended, I introduced myself to her and thanked her for the Nasreen Mohamedi show. I told her what a powerful impact discovering Nasreen in her show had on me (to this day, the only show I’ve devoted two pieces to). She responded asking me about one word I had chosen in expressing that, and immediately suggested a clarification. I came away feeling I had just spoken to one of the smartest people I’d ever met.

Sheena Wagstaff breaks through. Chelsea, April, 2018.

In 2018, I accidentally ran across her when we were both out seeing shows in Chelsea. The Whitestone Gallery had installed a piece over the entrance to their Gutai Art Association show that appeared as it it had been broken through, requiring visitors to walk through it to enter. I stood in the lobby watching visitors navigating this and snapping photos as they tried to “break through to the other side.” When I got home, I realized that one of those visitors was Sheena Wagstaff! I didn’t recognize her from the back. Now, this Photo speaks to me of her breaking through barriers while she was at The Met. Her shows were about inclusion, and breaking barriers, if nothing else.

Thank you, Sheena, so very much- for all of it.

Julie Mehretu, Conversion (S.M. del Popolo/After C.), 2019-20, just one of the countless pieces to enter The Met’s permanent collection of M & C Art during Sheena Wagstaff’s tenure, one of the last pieces in the most recent incarnation of her Epic Abstraction show, seen on July 2, 2022, the week before she left.

Her Met legacy will live on both in the shows she’s facilitated and the Art she has helped bring into the collection. In my opinion, her’s will be a tough act to follow at The Met. The Museum has been compared to an aircraft carrier. Given its four-city-block size, it’s bigger than one. Turning this ship is a MASSIVE undertaking, which is why I used the sea-faring analogy in my 2016 Sheena Wagstaff “Rules The Waves” piece. She has managed to turn the Met’s M & C exhibitions, and more importantly, its permanent collection, in the direction of inclusion. Whoever comes next is a very critical choice given that AND that the M & C wing is about to undertake is long-awaited remodeling. 

Though The Met is probably casting a very wide net for that person, here in NYC, it seems to me that now might be the time to see if Massimilliano Gioni might be interested in the position. He’s done a terrific job as Artistic Director at the New Museum. I’m saying nothing against them in suggesting him. 

*-Soundtrack for this Post is “Thank U” by Alanis Morissette from Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, 1998, about which Alanis said, “Basically, I had never stopped in my whole life, hadn’t taken a long breath, and I took a year and a half off and basically learned how to do that…” I hope Ms. Wagstaff is now able to take a long breath. Somehow, I doubt she will.

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