The Most Powerful Woman in the New York Art World

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Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum in Lower Manhattan, walked into a cafe on Broadway one late-winter afternoon trying to steal a few minutes for lunch — it was 4:30, almost sundown. She had looked at her phone, and her eyes widened at a piece of news just then ricocheting around the art world, that Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for eight years, had resigned under pressure amid budget and leadership problems.

“I don’t have any idea what the circumstances are,” Ms. Phillips said, “but, look, no matter what, it’s just a very hard job.”

And she should know: At 63, Ms. Phillips has been running an art museum in New York longer than anyone except Glenn Lowry at the Museum of Modern Art (she took over in 1999, he in 1995.) She is one of only two directors in the city who has overseen the construction of a brand-new building (the New Museum’s unorthodox Bowery home, opened in 2007; Adam Weinberg, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, opened his new building in the meatpacking district two years ago.) And she is now in the midst of an $80 million capital campaign to double her museum’s size, a project notable at least so far for its sotto-voce nature, in sharp contrast to the expansion Mr. Lowry is overseeing, which has involved the widely criticized razing of the former home of the American Folk Art Museum.

“Even with the expansion, it’s not about bigger being better, which has become the reflex position,” she said. “Yes we need space. But it’s more about using the space and the money we raise to think about what the museum needs to become in the 21st century.”

She added: “The concept of soft power has become a bit of a cliché, I guess. But it’s the way I’ve always thought about what I do, and I think it’s the way this museum has made a difference.”

As her institution celebrates its 40th anniversary, Ms. Phillips has fully entered the dean stage of a museum career. Yet she remains one of the least publicly recognized members of the museum-leader tribe, owing in part to a constitutional aversion to chest-thumping that has left her standing somewhat in the shadows of her contemporaries. (She has, for example, over more than 30 years as a curator and director, never been profiled by this publication, and I could find only one extensive magazine article devoted to her.)

But her molding of the New Museum from a near-guerrilla, artist-beloved operation founded by another woman, Marcia Tucker, into what it is today — a highly regarded, still-nimble institution that has shaped its own unmistakable personality in the world’s most overcrowded city for contemporary art — has earned her the respect of those who compete with her for shows, patrons and attention.

“Because she’s so low-key and doesn’t blow her own horn, I think that in 20 years, when she’s no longer a director, people are going to look back and say she was one of the great museum directors of her generation, I really do,” Mr. Weinberg said.

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