New York University announced Tuesday that Alison Weaver will serve as the next director of its Grey Art Museum. She will begin in the role on May 26, after the conclusion of the current academic year. Weaver succeeds Lynn Gumpert, who retired last year and had been in the role since 1997.
Weaver comes to NYU from another university museum, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, where she served as founding executive director since 2015. Her last day at Rice will be on May 1.
As founding director, Weaver was charged with overseeing the completion of a new 50,000-square-foot building for the Moody Center, which opened in 2017, and creating the programming and vision for the new institution. She also launched an artist-in-residence program at the museum, which has invited the likes of Mona Hatoum, Coco Fusco, Bryon Kim, Leslie Hewitt, and Trevor Paglen to Houston. During her tenure, she also curated more than 25 exhibitions at the Moody Center and grew Rice’s art holdings, adding works by artists like Charles Gaines, Carmen Herrera, and Eva LeWitt across the campus.
“Alison profoundly and visibly shaped the arts at Rice since she took the helm of the Moody in July 2015,” Rice president Reginald DesRoches said in a statement. “Her extraordinary leadership, innovative spirit and dedication to the Moody over the past decade have elevated the arts on campus and across Houston and have earned the university national and international acclaim.”
In Texas, she also served as co-chair of the Houston Museum District and a trustee of Texans for the Arts. Prior to the Moody Center, Weaver taught art history at the City University of New York and served as director of affiliate museums at the Guggenheim Museum, overseeing its outposts in Bilbao and Venice, as well as its now closed ones in Berlin and Las Vegas.
The Grey, which was founded in 1975 as the Grey Art Gallery, is among the country’s top university museums, having produced major scholarly exhibitions on artists like Frank Moore and Jesús Rafael Soto, as well as group exhibitions like “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965” (2017) and “Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s” (2020). It also maintains a collection of more than 6,000 objects.
“Few, if any, research universities have a deeper, more encompassing connection to the arts than NYU. … For 50 years, The Grey has been a core part of that—curating important exhibitions and making outsized contributions to the downtown New York arts scene,” NYU president Linda G. Mills said in a statement. “Alison Weaver clearly understands the important role that The Grey plays both within the NYU community and more broadly in the city’s arts community. She’s keenly sensitive to the variety of constituencies that a university-based art institution such as The Grey Museum needs to serve.”
In 2024, the Grey moved from the ground floor and basement of NYU’s main Silver Building to a custom-designed space at 18 Cooper Square, changing its name from “gallery” to “museum.” Its new home, which measures 14,000 square feet, added over 40 percent more exhibition space.
“The Grey Art Museum occupies a unique position at the intersection of rigorous scholarship, contemporary artistic practice, and public engagement,” Weaver said in a statement. “As the museum enters this important next chapter in its new home, I’m excited to work with NYU’s extraordinary faculty, students, and staff to expand The Grey’s role as a laboratory for ideas and a vital cultural resource for the city.”
