NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announced that Associate Director Kathy Halbreich will be the first Laurenz Foundation Curator, a newly endowed position. This generous endowment provided by Trustee Maja Oeri and the Laurenz Foundation will provide essential funding to support the Museum’s curatorial goals now and in the future. The named position will rotate among MoMA’s curators based on the programming needs of the Museum.

“I am profoundly grateful to Maja Oeri and the Laurenz Foundation for their exemplary generosity and commitment to The Museum of Modern Art and its curatorial needs. This endowment will greatly help the Museum meet its intellectual and artistic goals as we look to the future,” said MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry. Ms. Halbreich, who will retain the title of Associate Director, said, “Nothing could bring me greater pleasure than to be the first Laurenz Foundation Curator, as I admire Maja’s deep commitment to artists as well as scholarship.”

Kathy Halbreich joined the Museum as Associate Director in 2008 after serving as Director of Walker Art Center for 16 years. In this role, she focuses on developing strategies and curatorial policies designed to strengthen contemporary programming and initiatives at MoMA and MoMA PS1, both locally and globally, and oversees the Modern Women's Fund, which seeks to increase the visibility of women artists through research, presentations, and acquisitions. She oversees the Museum’s acquisitions of very recent art through the Fund for the Twenty-First Century and through research projects intended to expand the curators' knowledge of global art histories. In 2014, Ms. Halbreich was the lead curator of Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010, organized with Tate Modern. This was the first major exhibition to include all of the mediums explored by Polke, and was one of the largest shows ever organized at MoMA. Ms. Halbreich is co-organizing a retrospective of Bruce Nauman with the Schaulager, to open in 2018.

The Laurenz Foundation was established in 1999 by Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann in memory of their son Laurenz Jakob who died an untimely death. The Foundation funds Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland, an institution that has invented a new form of furthering and studying art.