Laura Hoptman

During her initial years at MoMA, Hoptman organized a special-project show at the museum of the figurative painters Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin, and Luc Tuymans, which introduced the then-renegade artists to a wider audience and was praised by Roberta Smith in the New York Times as giving "an exciting, if truncated, view of what painting is up to in the post-modern age of mechanical reproduction." However, Hoptman was reportedly questioned within MoMA about her objectivity in choosing the artists, whom she admitted were her friends. At the New Museum, where she curated a Peyton retrospective in 2008 and Jeremy Deller's "Conversations About Iraq" project last year, she again came under scrutiny for possible favoritism because Peyton and Deller — in addition to being Hoptman's friends — are both represented by Gavin Brown's Enterprise, a gallery that also shows Hoptman's husband, the painter Verne Dawson.