Being the executive director of the world’s only museum dedicated solely to collecting and showcasing the work of queer arts is far from easy, but Alyssa Nitchun has taken the position in her stride. Within her three- and half-year tenure at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art this New York-native has transformed the Manhattan institution into a hub of social discourse and a destination for largely overlooked art.

The 2024 program has been bookended by the first comprehensive survey of the 20th century American photographer Christian Walker and Andrea Geyer’s exhibition of quilts, embroidered silkscreens and films. The museum kicks off the new year with an exhibition with the Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Young Joon Kwak, and Nitchun has a busy December itinerary that includes trips to Havana Biennial and São Paulo Museum of Art.

Here, she looks back at 2024 and what she expects from the year ahead.

What project or a moment that stood out for you as a personal highlight of 2024?

I was honored, alongside the museum, by Adrienne Eadie Adams who is the speaker of the City Council of New York City. Every Pride Month the speaker chooses a person to recognize. Adams’s choice made a proclamation to honor fifty-five years of the Leslie Lohman Museum’s existence. It was a real highlight to be honored by the city, and by a woman.

What was the best show you saw in New York City this year?

I always think about how to handle running an institution and what it means to be an art-lover human. I will say that mounting Andrea Geyer’s solo exhibition, “A Promise of Lighting”, at the museum was a highlight. She is an artist that I have tremendous respect for, and in terms of the roster of exhibitions that our Head Curator Stamatina Gregory and I are building, this was a standout.

Besides that, I have a soft spot for Siobhan Liddell’s show, “Going Without Saying”, and Gordon Robichaux and Mark Armijo McKnight’s “Decreation” at the Whitney Museum. One of first exhibitions I opened at Leslie Lohman was Laura Aguilar’s “Show and Tell”, which has an electric resonance with Mark’s work.

What about the best show you saw abroad?

I am actually switching this up slightly, because I still haven’t seen the show I’m most excited about this year. MASP in São Paulo is about to open a major exhibition of queer histories curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and art historian and Columbia University professor Julia Bryan-Wilson. They are showing over 200 works, looking broadly at queer history broken down into eight different sections, such as eco-sexualities and fantasy icons. We loaned a bunch of works from our collection.

I am excited to see Adriano in a post-Biennale glow and how he focuses specifically on queer work with Julia. The last big queer show in Brazil, Queermuseu, ended up being shut down because of riots in 2017. I am paying extra attention to the boldness of putting on queer shows in times of political, governmental, and cultural opposition.

Installation view of Andrea Geyer, “a promise of lightning”, curated by Stamatina Gregory, Head Curator / Director of Exhibitions and Collections. Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, September 4, 2024–January 12, 2025. Photograph by Object Studies. © 2024 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York.

What are you looking forward to most in 2025?

One of the things that I have been envisioning since I started at Leslie Loman was mounting a traveling exhibition of our collection. We have finally received a very large award from the Henry Luce Foundation to develop the show, which will first travel around the United States in 2026 to museums in places that have less access to queer art and queer storytelling. Then, it will travel internationally. 2025 is going to be the year of developing the exhibition, research, and development. I feel galvanized and also very privileged thinking about the stories we are going to tell. Post election, we need to refine how we are supporting radically affirming LGBTQ+ lives and support telling those stories.

If you could change one thing in the art world for next year, what would it be?

I would like the art world itself to embrace fearlessness, radical conviction, and compassionate courage more. Those are my frameworks for the work that I do. Artists are fearless and they make work from a space of radical conviction. Often, art itself is a tool for enacting compassionate courage. But I would like to see these in the art world itself, providing the armature and the support to move in that space.

What is one piece of advice you would give to yourself this time last year?

This time last year I was making a lot of internal structural changes at the museum and dealing with some significant budget unpredictability. I was overwhelmed, but looking back, I see how the pieces have actually come together productively and harmoniously to create really important change and positivity, I would tell myself it is never a failure, always a lesson. I would reframe the notion of failure always as an opportunity for deeper listening and for deeper connection. adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy has been my guidebook as an executive director and to build trust around the people right next to you to find the ultimate space of effectiveness.

Who is the art professional you have your eye on for 2025?

My answer is very broadly the queer art professionals, and particularly queer art professionals who are either leading explicitly queer institutions or providing support to amplify the work of queer artists. As a leader of an explicitly queer museum at a moment when the government is now openly and actively hostile towards LGBTQ+ people, I am watching how we as arts professionals are able to serve our communities with courage and with conviction.

I would say extending beyond queerness, we need to think about the most marginalized and the most disenfranchised in our communities and how we as queer professionals can serve those communities.