Associate Director, Finance and Administration
Laurie Duke
Photo: Tracey Friedman/NYU
Photo: Tracey Friedman/NYU
About
The Grey Art Museum, New York University’s fine arts museum and steward of the NYU Art Collection, enables and encourages transformative encounters with works of art. Engaging with challenging issues in the study of material culture, the Grey serves as a museum-laboratory, sparking interdisciplinary scholarship.
Uniquely positioned to cultivate visual literacy and critical thinking, the Grey shares NYU’s fundamental commitment as a global research university to advance knowledge of different cultures, contexts, and histories across time. The Grey also fosters experiential learning through its collections and participates in the cultural, intellectual, and environmental spheres of NYU’s Global Network, of New York City, and of the broader world.
Mission and Values
The Grey Art Museum and its staff promote the following values:
Innovative scholarship—we are dedicated to producing rigorous scholarship that expands the art historical canon and presents new ideas, both to strengthen the academic community and to enrich learning for our broader audiences.
Inclusion—we actively address inequity and injustice, and seek to empower staff, students, faculty, and community members of all backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.
Access—we strive to create a culture of mutually beneficial engagement that provides opportunities for all students and viewers to build cultural capital, learn about careers in the arts, and inform the museum’s goals and vision.
Interdisciplinary learning, engagement, and community outreach—we cultivate encounters with a range of disciplines, time periods, and global perspectives, and foster collaborative relationships across NYU as well as with peer institutions and community-based organizations, providing opportunities for multifaceted education.
History
For nearly 50 years, the Grey Art Museum—formerly known as the Grey Art Gallery—was located within New York University’s Silver Center, the site of NYU’s original home, the legendary University Building (1835 to 1892). Winslow Homer, Daniel Huntington, Samuel Colt, George Innes, and Henry James all lived and worked there, as did Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, who established the first academic fine arts department in America on the museum’s original site.
Demolished in 1892, the original building was replaced by the Main Building (renamed the Silver Center in 2002). Here was located, from 1927 to 1942, A. E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, NYU’s first art museum and the first institution in this country to exhibit work by Picasso, Léger, Mirò, Mondrian, Arp and members of the American Abstract Artists group. Gallatin aspired to create a forum for intellectual exchange, a place where artists would congregate to acquaint themselves with the latest developments in contemporary art. In 1975, with a generous gift from Midwestern art collector Mrs. Abby Weed Grey, the Museum’s original space was renovated, offices and a collection storage facility were added, and the doors were reopened as the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center. Since its founding, the Grey has been the steward of the New York University Art Collection, which, since its founding in 1958, has amassed nearly 7,000 objects.
In 2024, the Grey made a transformative move to a purpose-designed, larger, and more visible space at 18 Cooper Square in lower Manhattan. With this move, made possible in part by a generous gift from longtime art patrons and social activists Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett, the Grey was renamed the Grey Art Museum. The Grey’s new home—with 40% more exhibition space—occupies the entire ground floor of a venerable brick and iron building in the historic NoHo district, its storefront façade facing out onto a busy pedestrian thoroughfare.
The Grey’s exhibitions have long been must-sees for critics, artists, and the museum-going public. Landmark presentations include those devoted to Frida Kahlo (1983), Peter Hujar (1990), Atsuko Tanaka (2004), Tseng Kwong Chi (2015), and paintings by self-taught Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine paired with the drawings of neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018). Topics have ranged from the art of the royal court of Benin (1981), moon landing photographs (1981), Rosalind Solomon’s portraits in the time of AIDS (1988), and the avant-garde design of Shiro Kuramata (1998) to the modernisms of Iran, Turkey, and India (2019).
Staff
Assistant to the Director | Press Officer
Sofeia Eddy
Exhibitions and Publications Manager
Allegra Favila
Preparator
Noah Landfield
Administrative Assistant
Eric Oresick
Head of Education and Programs
Leah Sweet
Head of Collections
Saskia K. Verlaan
Chief Preparator
Richard Wager
Director
Alison Weaver
Deputy Director
Michèle Wong