Jessica
Morgan

Jessica Morgan has travelled the world looking for forgotten artists. One time, she was chatting with an art dealer in his office in Beirut when she noticed a small sculpture on his shelf that “looked like building blocks of wood; it was so interesting.” It was by a Lebanese artist called Saloua Raouda Choucair, who had studied in Paris in the 1940s and worked in the studio of the modernist giant Fernand Léger. But Choucair’s own art – rooted in abstraction and exploring her interests in science, mathematics, Islamic art and poetry – had never been properly acknowledged. So Jessica went to see her. By then, Choucair was in her 90s and suffering with dementia. But her daughter had carefully preserved her mother’s lifetime’s work in her Beirut apartment, “because nobody had ever really shown it or collected it,” remembers Jessica, then a senior cur-ator at Tate Modern. The visit led to a solo exhibition at the London museum in 2013, the artist’s first in a major international institution, and to Tate’s acquisition of seven paintings and sculptures by Choucair, who is now recognised as a global talent.

Again and again, in Europe and the Middle East, South Asia, South Korea and Latin America, Jessica has excavated overlooked artistic histories and championed marginalised artists. “What drives me on is finding the artists we’re not talking or writing about, that we’re not showing,” she tells me when we meet in her office in Chelsea, New York, on a hot day in late June.

For the past 10 years Jessica has done this work as the director of Dia Art Foundation, set up 51 years ago to help a small group of artists with wildly ambitious visions realise their projects. In 1977 it commissioned the sculptor Walter De Maria to create “The Lightning Field” in the New Mexico desert; the work consists of 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a grid which act as lightning conductor during storms and are illuminated by sunlight in good weather. It is still owned and maintained by Dia, along with 11 other locations, including De Maria’s “New York Earth Room” (1977), a first-floor apartment on Wooster Street filled with 127,300 kilograms of soil; a converted fire station in Bridgehampton, Long Island, containing a permanent installation of nine fluorescent light sculptures by Dan Flavin; and an enormous museum which opened in 2003 in a former Nabisco box plant in Beacon, New York, to display Dia’s collection of mostly minimal and conceptual work by artists from the 1960s and 1970s. Jessica, 56, has presided over this empire of art with a strong mandate for modernisation. “When I was hired the board was well aware that we were only showing a tiny fraction of the art that had been made in those decades, and there was enormous enthusiasm for change,” she tells me.

We are on the sixth floor of a Dia building on West 22nd Street. Jessica sits smiling across a marble-topped table from me, the shelves behind her lined with art books. She is stylish but practical: her brown hair is cut short, her face unadorned by make-up. Her sleeveless, floor-length denim dress is by the Lebanese designer Rabih Kayrouz. “It’s ancient, I’ve had it for years. I love his stuff.” On her feet are white Birkenstocks – “I live in these in summer” – chiming with her white handwoven intrecciato tote bag by Bottega Veneta, the Italian fashion house that has sponsored Dia for the past five years (more on this later). “This goes with me everywhere. I take it on trains, put it under plane seats. If I have a smaller bag with me, I’ll stick it in the tote,” Jessica says.

She started as a curator in the United States after moving there from London for a fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art in 1992. After stints at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she served for four years as the chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. There, she organised solo exhibitions for artists who were mostly unknown in North America and later went on to stratospheric success, like the South African-Dutch painter Marlene Dumas. “It’s crazy she hadn’t been shown in the US before,” Jessica says. She also gave the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and the German Carsten Höller their first major US museum exhibitions. “Deliberately, a lot of these artists were not American. I was trying to think about what wasn’t being shown here.”

In 2002, she returned to London to work at Tate Modern, which had opened two years earlier in a converted power station on Bankside in central London. Armed with an American unflappability about asking rich people for money, Jessica proved there that she is one of the great collection-builders of our time. She set up acquisition committees of wealthy donors for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and with their funding and her research she identified “around 100” artists and added them to Tate’s permanent collection, working in particular with the then director of collection for international art, Frances Morris.

“Jessica came to Tate Modern with a much more international outlook than most,” Catherine Wood, the institution’s director of programme, says. “Her exhaustive, artist-centred research – when she goes somewhere she sees every studio, meets every artist she can – has helped shape the spirit of this place. She is also very, very un-usual in genuinely enjoying the company of the people she fundraises from. She doesn’t see a divide between us and them; she has real friends and allies among her donors. I don’t know many others, if any, like her.

In 2014, Jessica directed the Gwangju Bienniale in South Korea. The Turkish-born independent curator Fatoş Üstek was part of the team she hired to help organise the exhibition. “The thorough, methodical research we did, going through multiple catalogues, speaking to many curators, managed to unearth some Korean artists whose legacy would otherwise be lost,” Üstek tells me over Zoom. Jessica also encouraged Üstek to stand her ground. “Being a female curator in Korea was not easy. Whenever I approached the installation team with a timeline and said, ‘We need to install this,’ or ‘This needs to be over there,’ they were always going on multiple cigarette breaks, trying not to listen to me. When I brought it up to Jessica she really supported me. I am profoundly impressed by her and am delighted that our lives intersected.”

Jessica continued her collection-building at Dia, which she joined in 2015. Back then there were only 33 artists, six of them women and one, the Japanese conceptualist On Kawara, an artist of colour. Today the foundation owns work by 84 artists, 29 of them women and 23 of them Asian, Black or Latin American / Latino / a. “Our duty as an institution focused on the 1960s and 1970s is to have a full conversation about what was happening at that time. Otherwise we can’t possibly hold our head up and say we’re deeply examining this period,” she says. She also increased the endowment to $140 million from $40 million, added 22 new trustees to the board, created 85 new staff positions, and revived Dia’s exhibition space in New York (now in three interconnected buildings in Chelsea), as well as its programme of commissioning contempo-rary art, the reason it was set up in the first place.

The work that Jessica has done is “timely and important”, says Glenn Lowry, the outgoing director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I have nothing but tremendous admiration for her as a curator and as a director and for her openness to the breadth of artistic practices that make up the richness of our world.” Jessica was born and raised in London along with an older sister, Lucy, 59, who performed as a circus trapeze artist for 12 years and then became an aerial choreographer for films including Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins before pivoting to work as a lawyer. Today she is an associate director of legal, compliance and governance at the charity Breast Cancer Now. “I’m very proud of her; she’s an amazing person,” Jessica says. “She has three kids, one of whom is severely disabled, and she’s been an incredible pioneer campaigning for Down’s and autism and has set up various groups that have done incredible work. She’s the person who manages to do a million things as a single mother.” Jessica’s Irish mother, Finola Morgan, had wanted to be an artist, but “her parents didn’t let her go to art school, as was so often the case then,” so she became a teacher. Her Welsh father, Leon Morgan, an intellectual-property lawyer, left when Jessica was 10, and her parents divorced. Jessica describes her behaviour at school as “terrible. I was hell-bent on making trouble and not particularly academic.” When she was 13, she and a group of her friends took part in a ring-toss game at the school’s summer fair. “I don’t know what the staff was thinking, but the rings would land on bottles of alcohol. My friends and I won the game and wandered off with all the bottles. We got outrageously drunk, ended up in the swimming pool and got in a lot of trouble. It was great fun.”

Meanwhile, back home, her mother’s new partner, the English journalist, Soho fixture and legendary alcoholic Jeffrey Bernard, “semi-lived with us for a number of years. I’d come home and he’d be fast asleep on the couch with a cigarette that was about to set fire to the house. He was super funny and charming and handsome, so I could understand my mother’s attraction to someone who would fall asleep at the dining table with his face in the soup. After my parents divorced, an amazing group of people would congregate in our living room every night, smoking and drinking and holding forth. I’d be secretly in the corner listening to them all.” They included the Observer journalist Sally Vincent and her partner, Peter; the feminist writer and filmmaker Midge Mackenzie; and the actor Joe Melia and his wife, Flora, an ex-communist. “They were all like surrogate family members for me.”

A turning point for Jessica came when she was 16 and transferred to the elite Westminster School. An inspiring art history teacher, Kate Miller, encouraged her to read far beyond the scope of her school texts and ignited a curiosity and intellectual drive that eventually gained Jessica a place at King’s College, Cambridge. “I’ll always be grateful to her for getting me excited and interested and pushing me far beyond anything I thought I’d be capable of doing.” Jessica’s university years were devoted to the study of Italian and Northern Renaissance art, running the women’s group at her college and taking part in protests against Thatcherite policies such as the poll tax. “The other students were all excited to party, but I had been exposed to things at a very young age, so I was kind of a bit over that.”

By then, she was determined to leave Britain. “It felt limiting to me. I definitely felt as a young woman that there was only going to be so much that I would be allowed to do there, and I wanted to see other places and be exposed to something new.” As Jessica planned her escape, she had a front-row seat to the rise of a new artistic movement: the so-called YBAs, Young British Artists – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, and Jake and Dinos Chapman, among others – who exploded onto the scene with brash, attention-grabbing art which seduced critics, curators and the market. But not Jessica. From the age of 16 until she left Britain for the US, she worked the front desk of the Groucho Club in Soho during school and university breaks. It was ground zero for the YBAs, whose drunken antics there often made headlines. “They were very badly behaved, and I got the brunt of it. My job was to put drunk people in cars and send them home, only for them to come back 20 minutes later so I’d have to repeat the whole thing. I’m not naming any names, but they were all there and there was lots of inappropriate behaviour, especially towards a young person, as I was then.”

She also disliked their art. “I found it cynical. What it was saying about English culture and society felt like it was taking us in a direction I was not excited about.” Ironically, once she’d moved to the States, the enthusiasm for the YBAs followed her there. She spent a year in New York working for the art dealer Larry Gagosian between fellowships at the Yale and Harvard museums. “I always remember him coming up to me and asking, ‘Jessica, what do you think about Dinos and Jake Chapman?’ And I said, ‘I can’t stand any of them,’ which, of course, he totally ignored and did tons of shows with those artists.”

After meeting Jessica, I visit Dia Beacon, 59 miles north of Manhattan along the green banks of the Hudson River. With its 240,000 square feet of gallery space, it breaks most of the rules other museums live by. Artists are given immense spaces for displays; their work is shown for years, sometimes decades, on end; and there is no churn of short-term shows and no attempt to stage the blockbuster exhibitions other major institutions depend on to balance their budgets. In this way, it has earned a revered status in the art world as a unique destination for quiet contemplation. Though it attracted 120,000 visitors in the year to 30 June 2025, the spaces are so enormous that “even on super busy holiday weekends where we might have thousands of people, you can always drift off somewhere and have a solitary experience,” Jessica tells me later.

One immense, sunlit gallery space is now devoted to sculptures in natural materials like soil, beeswax, moss and sticks, all by Meg Webster, 81. Webster was taught by Richard Serra and Donald Judd and then worked for Michael Heizer; all three artists’ sculptures have been on show at Dia Beacon since it opened. Webster says she’s “thrilled” her art is now being exhibited alongside theirs. Some of her works recall the shapes of sculptures by her former teachers; her curved “Wall of Beeswax” (1990), for example, is a clear nod to Serra’s sinuous steel constructions exhibited nearby. “I’m echoing them, but I’m echoing them on a more local scale. I always meant for my work to be immediate and something you relate to physically,” Webster says. In September, she will recreate her sculptures in Paris with locally sourced materials for a show on minimalism curated by Jessica; it opens on 8 October at the Bourse de Commerce, an exhibition space run by the French collector François Pinault, the founder of the luxury group Kering.

Another artist who will soon have his work shown at Dia Beacon is Tehching Hsieh, from Taiwan. He started his career as a radical performance artist at the age of 23 by jumping out of a second-storey window and breaking both ankles on the concrete below while a collaborator filmed him on a Super 8 camera. “My ankles still hurt to this day,” Hseih, now 74, tells me over Zoom. He would go on to live in a cage for a year, using a bucket as a toilet, and tie himself to a fellow artist for another year, among other astounding feats of endurance and self-discipline. Last year he bequeathed 11 of his most important works to Dia, which is showing some of them in the artist’s first ever retrospective, opening 3 October. When I ask him if he’s pleased that his work will be exhibited for at least two years, a broad grin erupts on Hsieh’s face. “Two years! It’s great,” he says.

Providing a global perspective on art-making in the 1960s and 1970s and greatly increasing the represent-ation of female artists and artists of colour was always part of Jessica’s plan for the foundation. Everywhere you look at Dia Beacon, there are new displays of work by these artists: the water-filled vinyl sculptures of Senga Nengudi, for example, and text-based banners by Renée Green. When she started, Jessica had a “long list” of artists she hoped to work with at Dia Beacon and elsewhere. And one of the first things she did was to right a historical wrong by beginning the process of acquiring Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” (1973–76), four concrete cylinders that rest on the Utah desert floor and are aligned to frame the sun during the summer and winter solstices. Holt had travelled to the American Southwest with her husband, Robert Smithson, whose most famous work, “Spiral Jetty” (1970), a 1,500-foot coil made from black basalt and earth that winds into the water off the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, was donated to Dia by his estate in 1999. “How could Dia have had all these conversations with Nancy about ‘Spiral Jetty’ and no one said: ‘What about your own incredible work on the other side of the Salt Lake?’ It blows my mind. It’s so shocking. But they didn’t,” Jessica says. “Sun Tunnels” finally entered Dia’s collection in 2018.

Ten days after our first meeting, I speak to Jessica again over Zoom. She is just back from Brazil, where she had travelled with her son, Konrad, 21, a student at Malmö University in Sweden, to visit artists’ studios, museums and restaurants in preparation for leading a trustees’ trip there in November. Her husband, Ulrich Lehmann, a professor of design theory and practice at Parsons, the New School, stayed home in New York, because “his idea of a good holiday is to climb a mountain,” Jessica says.

She is looking forward to spending time with her trustees. “They’re lovely to be with. Really interesting people,” she says. Much of her time now is devoted to fundraising and socialising with potential sponsors. To date, she has raised $100 million for the endowment, $22 million for the renovation of the Chelsea exhibition space, and funding to help cover the $20 million annual operating expenses (up from $9 million when she started). “I love that part of the job. It connects us with new people, it brings rele-vance to what we do through all kinds of conversations that happen as a result of it, and it’s also about being a responsible director and making sure that you’re running an institution that will not face a crisis.”

One of the sponsors she has forged alliances with is Bottega Veneta, which provides ongoing support and also funds Dia’s annual spring gala in Beacon. “What has been incredible with them is that we’re not an easy partner for a corporation. We barely put our own name on anything, and they’re OK with the fact that we do not plaster their name everywhere,” Jessica says. “They had already moved to a marketing and media understanding that it’s much cooler to be quiet and infiltrate in ways that are creative and thoughtful. We’re also aligned with many of the things they stand for, which is craftsmanship and valuing the history of their products – where they’re made, how they’re made. Those things resonate with us. And I’m thrilled that there’s a woman from the UK running it now, Louise Trotter, although her predecessor, Matthieu Blazy, was wonderful too. It’s just been a very sympathetic collaboration. When I was at Tate, a lot of the corporate sponsors came in with very clear ideas of how we should do things. We always found ways to meet their requests, but it was sometimes a bit of a tussle.”

Most days, Jessica has lunch with people who may give money to Dia. And then there are “hundreds and hundreds of emails, which I reply to personally.” To keep fit, she does yoga “religiously”, wherever she is, following the online videos of a teacher, Rika Henry, whose classes Jessica used to attend at an Equinox gym. “I take my yoga mat with me everywhere, and I can do it at 6am in the morning or 10pm at night. And I’ve got so much better, because I can do all the things that she does, which I would never have dared do in the gym for fear of falling on somebody.”

When I ask Jessica to name a television show she has watched recently, she struggles to come up with one. “We don’t have a TV, although I do watch the odd series if people recommend something. The last one was Get Millie Black. It’s about a female detective who spent time in the UK, then went back to Jamaica. Her brother is trans, with drug issues. It’s really good, but I watched that months ago. Sometimes my husband and I will watch films on a tiny little screen rather than going to the cinema, but I’m afraid they tend to be four-hour Chinese subtitled films.” She would rather, quite likely, read about art.