Y. Tanaka-Reyes
Dr. Yuki Tanaka-Reyes
Director and Chief Curator
Previously Senior Curator of Modern Art, Walker Art Center. PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Founded in 1949 by a collector who wanted rooms enough to let the work breathe.
The Halden Museum of Art is a private, non-collecting trust established in 1949 by the Boston collector and patron Margaret Halden (1894—1972). Today it holds approximately 28,000 works across painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, and time-based media, presented in a building designed for slow looking.
Mission
What we believe a museum is for.
The Halden exists to make extraordinary works of modern and contemporary art available — without crowding, without rush, and without charge for anyone under eighteen — to the broadest possible public. We collect, conserve, exhibit, and interpret. We commission new work from living artists. We train the next generation of curators and conservators. And we keep, by deliberate institutional discipline, our galleries quiet enough that the work in them can be heard.
We are not a national museum, and not a teaching museum, and not a private museum. We are a non-profit trust accountable, by charter, to the people of Boston and to anyone who walks through our doors.
Halden Museum, Avery Street façade, c. 1951
History
A fuller history (PDF)
Seventy-seven years, four wings.
Margaret Halden began collecting in 1923 with the purchase of two small Bonnards. By the early 1940s, the collection had outgrown the second floor of her father’s house on Marlborough Street. She incorporated the museum in 1947, broke ground on a new building on a city-donated parcel at the edge of Boston Common in 1948, and opened to the public on 6 October 1949 with an exhibition of ninety-two paintings and forty-one drawings.
The original building was designed by the architect Henry Saltonstall Wright (1894—1968), a member of Halden’s extended circle who had spent the 1930s studying with Asplund in Stockholm. Wright’s building — the four-story, brick-and-limestone structure that still anchors the museum — was widely admired at the time as a kind of quiet rebuttal to the International Style museums then opening across the country.
The Halden has been expanded twice: in 1978 by Edward Larrabee Barnes, who added the Sculpture Court and the lower level photography galleries; and in 2007 by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, whose West Wing added 38,000 square feet of gallery, a 220-seat auditorium, and the conservation studios on Level 3.
The director and senior staff.
J. Okafor-Greer
James Okafor-Greer
Curator of Postwar American Art
Co-organizer, After the Garden. Author, Color in the Long 1960s (Yale, 2022).
H. Marsh
Helena Marsh
Curator of Photography
Organizer, Susanna Vance: A Survey. Formerly Assistant Curator, the Center for Creative Photography.
K. Engelmann
Dr. Karen Engelmann
Curator of European Art, 1850—1950
Co-organizer, Quiet Rooms. PhD, Aarhus University, on Danish painting 1890—1916.
R. Aldana
Renata Aldana
Chief Conservator
Twenty-two years at the Halden. Specialist in postwar acrylic surfaces and paper-based photography.
D. Friel
Daniel Friel
Director of Public Programs
Oversees the public programs office, school partnerships, and the Halden Letter.
A small set of numbers.
410k
visitors last year, of whom 36% were under thirty.
28,142
objects in the permanent collection, including 4,920 photographs.
12
exhibitions opened in 2025, including four organized in-house.
98%
of school visits underwritten in full by the Halden Education Fund.
$0
paid by any visitor under eighteen, in any year since 1949.
77
years since the doors opened, on 6 October 1949.
Support the museum.
The Halden is supported by membership, by individual giving, by the Halden Foundation, and by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Approximately sixty-two percent of our annual budget comes from private gifts.
Press & media.
Press releases, high-resolution images, and exhibition checklists are available on request.
Greta Lindqvist
Director of Communications
press@haldenmuseum.org
+1 617 555 0193
Get in touch.
218 Avery Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02116
+1 617 555 0190
info@haldenmuseum.org
Our offices answer the phone Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern.