REBECCA RABINOW LEAVES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM TO LEAD MENIL COLLECTION
Longtime Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Rebecca Rabinow will join the Menil Collection as its new director. Rabinow is currently the Met’s curator of modern art and curator in charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. Since she came to the Met in 1990, she has dedicated her career as a museum professional to the institution. Rabinow will take the helm at the Menil in July, succeeding Josef Helfenstein, who recently departed after twelve years at the collection to head the Kunstmuseum Basel.
A committee chose the Houston-native after an extensive nine-month international search. Janet Hobby, president of the board of trustees, said that Rabinow “combines the highest level of curatorial and scholarly achievement with a proven record of museum leadership and lifelong ties to Houston and the Menil Collection. We could not have hoped for more.”
Among the numerous exhibitions Rabinow has curated for the Met are “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection,” 2014–15; “Matisse, In Search of True Painting,” 2012–13; and “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 2012. She also co-organized the 2007 renovation and reinstallation of the Metropolitan’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European paintings and sculpture galleries. She has authored various essays for catalogues and articles for publications.
Rabinow said that she spent a summer volunteering at the Menil Collection when she was a recent college graduate in 1988. There, she worked on a preservation project for which she placed the Menil’s archived correspondence in Mylar sleeves. “However cut-and-dried that might sound, their letters radiated such a sense of history, mission, and creativity that I was hooked on the first day. It is abundantly clear to me that the Menil set me on my career path.”
After receiving her BA from Smith College in 1988, Rabinow continued her education at the Sorbonne, where she earned her MA in 1990, and at New York University, from which she graduated in 1995 with a Ph.D. She is also a 2013 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
The Menil Collection is the legacy of the philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil. The permanent collection consists of seventeen thousand objects. Established in 1987, the museum is the first building that architect Renzo Piano designed in the US.
