NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announced the establishment of a newly endowed position, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, which will be held by Leah Dickerman, Curator, in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. The generous endowment provided by Ms. Hess, who has been a Museum Trustee since 2002, will provide essential funding to support the Museum’s curatorial goals now and for the future.

“The Museum of Modern Art is grateful for this important endowment from our generous and longtime trustee Marlene Hess,” said MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry. “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.”

Ms. Dickerman has been Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture since 2008. Over her career, she has organized or co-organized a series of multi-media exhibitions that offer new perspectives on the modern including Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 (2012–2013), Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011– 2012), Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity (2009–2010), Dada (2005–2006), and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998). Her current exhibition projects include One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works, opening on April 3, co-organized with The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and a retrospective of the work of Robert Rauschenberg (2016–2017), co-organized with the Tate.

In 2013, the Museum announced that Ms. Dickerman would head the Museum Research Consortium, a new partnership with graduate art history programs at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The publications authored by Ms. Dickerman that accompanied Inventing Abstraction, Bauhaus, and Dada won recognition as “Outstanding Exhibition Catalogue” from the American Association of Museum Curators in their respective years; these exhibitions also won AICA “Best Exhibition” awards in their categories. Additionally, Inventing Abstraction and Bauhaus received AAMC “Outstanding Exhibition” awards in their respective categories, and Inventing Abstraction received the Dedalus Foundation award for an exhibition catalogue that “makes a significant contribution to the study of modernism.”

Dickerman received her B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. from Columbia. She has been on the editorial board of the journal October since 2001, and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Delaware.