Kynaston McShine

Kynaston McShine (born 1935) is a Trinidad and Tobago-born museum curator. In 1966, as curator at the Jewish Museum, he organized the first museum survey of minimalist art, Primary Structures. At the Museum of Modern Art, where he became associate curator in 1968, he initiated the innovative Projects series and has organized some of the museum’s most important exhibitions, including the early survey of conceptual art, Information (1970); exhibitions of Marcel Duchamp (1973), Joseph Cornell (1980), and Andy Warhol (1989); The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect (1999); Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul (2006); Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (2007). He has held positions in the MOMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture as Associate Curator, 1968–71; Curator of Exhibitions, 1971–84; Senior Curator, 1984–2001; Acting Chief Curator 2001-03 and Chief Curator at Large, 2003-2008. In 2003, McShine was the recipient of the CCS Bard for curatorial excellence.

In 1984 McShine curated "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although the exhibition was supposed to represent the top artists in the world, out of the 169 artists shown only 13 were women. McShine commented that any artist who wasn't in this show should rethink his career.

In 2017 it was revealed that a wedding cake sculpture commissioned by McShine for the Museum of Modern Art from Pat Lasch as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1979 was discarded by the museum sometime in the 1990s, a fact which was not disclosed to the artist until 2016.

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