Pablo Picasso "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon." Image courtesy of Flickr

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has appointed Leah Dickerman as the first Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture. The position was recently established by Marlene Hess, a philanthropic consultant and a Museum Trustee since 2002. Hess’ endowment will provide essential funding to support MoMA’s current and future curatorial goals.

According to a press release from the museum, MoMA’s Director, Glen D. Lowry, said, “The Museum of Modern Art is grateful for this important endowment from our generous and longtime trustee Marlene Hess. Marlene's commitment to the Museum's curatorial and intellectual development is exemplary and her support helps us realize our goals for the future. The appointment of Leah Dickerman to this position is in recognition of her many accomplishments as an art historian and curator whose work is marked by outstanding scholarship, critical insights, and daring initiatives.”

Dickerman has been a Curator in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture since 2008. She is also the Director of the Museum Research Consortium, a new partnership between MoMA and graduate art history programs at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Institute of Fine Arts, and the Graduate Center at The City University of New York. Before coming to MoMA, she was a curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Dickerman has organized (as well as co-organized) a swathe of celebrated exhibitions at MoMA, including Inventing Abstraction, 1912-1925 (2012-2013), which celebrated the centennial of abstraction and traced its development as it moved through a network of key modern artists; Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2009-2010), which brought together major works made for Rivera’s first monographic exhibition at MoMA in 1931; and Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity (2009-2010), a comprehensive survey of the famous and influential school of avant-garde art. Dickerman is currently co-organizing the exhibition One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works with The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The show, which opens on April 3, 2015 (on view through September 7, 2015), honors the Great Migration’s centennial by reuniting Jacob Lawrence’s famous series depicting the mass movement. The exhibition marks the first time that the suite of sixty panels has been shown at MoMA since 1994. Dickerman is also co-organizing a retrospective of the influential American artist Robert Rauschenberg with the Tate in London. The exhibition is slated to open in 2016.

MoMA boasts the world’s largest and most inclusive collection of modern painting and sculpture. Featuring some 3,600 works dating from the late nineteenth century to the present, the collection provides a comprehensive overview of the major artists and movements since the 1890s. Highlights include Paul Cezanne’s The Bather, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Paul Gauguin’s The Seed of the Aeroi, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Henri Matisse’s Dance (I), Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, Fernand Leger’s Three Women, Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I, Jasper Johns’ Flag, and James Turrell’s A Frontal Passage.