Makeda Best To Lead Moma Photography: Morning Links

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has filled one of its most closely watched curatorial posts. Makeda Best, currently deputy director at the Oakland Museum of California, will become chief curator of photography in September 2026, ending a vacancy that had stretched for nearly four years.

Best arrives with a background that bridges scholarship, making, and museum leadership. She is a photographer, studied at CalArts, earned a doctorate in art history at Harvard, and previously served as photography curator at Harvard Art Museums. In her remarks about the appointment, she signaled an interest in widening the field rather than simply maintaining its canon. Photography, she said, is a medium that is“always in crisis” and“always questioning itself,” and she argued that museums can no longer rely on the old model of hanging images on the wall and calling it enough.

That perspective matters at MoMA, where the photography department has long shaped how the medium is understood in the United States. Best pointed to Edward Steichen's historic acquisitions from the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression as an example of the kind of collection-building that can define public memory. Her emphasis on“big stories from the collection” suggests a curatorial agenda that will likely balance historical depth with a broader view of what photography can be now.

The appointment also lands at a moment when museums are under pressure to rethink how audiences encounter images, especially as photography moves across print, screen, installation, and social circulation. Best's arrival gives MoMA a curator with both institutional experience and a clear sense that the medium's future depends on more than display conventions.

The broader roundup of art-world news also included a new lead in the investigation into the 2025 Louvre crown jewels theft, after Belgian police found photographs of the museum on the phones of several Eastern European individuals arrested in an unrelated cargo-theft case. France and Belgium have opened a joint investigation, while the eight stolen jewels remain missing and are estimated at more than $102 million.

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