Among the things Kathy Halbreich plans to examine in her new role as associate director of the Museum of Modern Art is MoMA's hefty $20 admission fee, and whom it may be keeping out.MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, recruited Ms. Halbreich, who is the outgoing director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, largely for her track record at the Walker of working with contemporary artists and thinking across conventional disciplines. The large number of recent, relatively young hires at MoMA, including four new chief curators in the last two years, and the looming retirement of three major curators — chief curator for paintings and sculpture John Elderfield, chief curator-at-large Kynaston McShine, and deputy director (and director of P.S. 1) Alanna Heiss — suggest that the museum is in the midst of a significant directional and generational shift.Ms. Halbreich also brings to MoMA a strong belief in education and a conviction that museums should be deeply rooted in their communities. Since MoMA opened its new building in 2004, attendance has risen to over 2 million, of which a MoMA spokeswoman said around half are international tourists; the museum has no figures for domestic tourists.In a recent interview, Ms. Halbreich described herself as "only somewhat interested" in the tourist audience, which she said "will always be present" at the museum. "What I'm really interested in is young people, artists, and people who live in New York and could come back repeatedly," she said. "It's very expensive to operate these institutions, and I think people who can pay should. But I am interested in [what we can do] for those that can't pay."At the Walker, through a program called Explore!, low-income families, artists, and clients of local organizations, such as African American Family Services and the Minneapolis YWCA Girl Power Program, can get free admission to the museum.Ms. Halbreich said she wants to look into whether MoMA can be more involved with New York City public school students, particularly teenagers. She is also potentially interested in commissioning artists to do projects in New York City neighborhoods, as she did at the Walker. "When a living artist is in your neighborhood doing research, you're more likely come to the institution" that sent him or her, she said.Ms. Halbreich will assume her new post in February. In an interview, Mr. Lowry said that "Kathy's joining us continues and advances the direction we've been moving in for at least a decade" — namely, an increased focus on contemporary art in a global context, and pursuit of interdisciplinary projects.Ms. Halbreich said that one idea she has proposed to Mr. Lowry is whether MoMA should devote a gallery to displaying recent acquisitions. She added: "I also hope that in time the chiefs of departments, Glenn, and I can come up with a list of artists we wish to collect in depth across the departments, so you can see an artist's work in multiple media."Since the new building opened, Mr. Lowry has repeatedly discussed the problem of how a museum devoted to a historical movement, namely, Modernism, moves into the 21st century. "There's no question that part of why Glenn brought me in was my real interest in contemporary art and working with emerging artists," Connie Butler, who became the chief curator of drawings in January 2006, said in an interview. Prior to her appointment at MoMA, Ms. Butler, 44, had been a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and before that at, among other institutions, Artists Space, an exhibition space for emerging artists in Soho. After taking over the department at MoMA, she hired Christian Rattemeyer, 36, who had also been a curator at Artists Space, as an associate curator.The recent hires also reflect the global nature of the contemporary art world. Mr. Rattemeyer, for example, is German, as is the chief curator in the newly created department of media, Klaus Biesenbach, and a new curator of contemporary architecture, Andres Lepik. And some of them, at least, spend a lot of time traveling. Mr. Biesenbach fit in an interview among recent trips to in Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Athens, and London.Mr. Biesenbach said that his two upcoming projects at the museum involve European artists. He is co-curating with a curator of photography, Roxana Marcoci, a survey next spring of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Next will be "a presentation of a younger Swiss female artist, similar in scale to Doug Aitken," he said, referring to "Sleepwalkers," a work co-produced by MoMA and Creative Time, in which Mr. Aitken projected a collage of films about ordinary New Yorkers going through their day on the exterior walls of the museum.Mr. Rattemeyer, who started at MoMA in January, said that he is excited by the sense of a changing of the guard at the museum. "At meetings with colleagues, you look around the room and you realize there are a lot more people here than were even five months ago, and they're all in their 30s or 40s," he said.