Projects 70: Banners I
November 22, 1999–May 1, 2000

Projects 70: Banners I is the first in a cycle of three exhibitions that feature artist-designed banners. They will be displayed on the Museum's Fifty-third Street facade flanked by banners bearing MoMA's logo. The participating artists in the first series are Shirin Neshat, Simon Patterson, and Xu Bing. Idiosyncratically, each artist tests the ramifications of the written word. Shifting the information and twisting our habits of perception, Neshat's quotations of Persian poetry, Patterson's acrobatic text, and Xu's simulations of Chinese calligraphy reveal the complex nature of visual data.

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Julia Margaret Cameron's Women
January 28–May 4, 1999

Composed of approximately sixty photographs drawn from public and private collections worldwide, this is the first exhibition to closely examine Cameron's photographs of women.

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Projects 67: Elaine Reichek
February 4–March 30, 1999

New York-based artist Elaine Reichek uses knitting and embroidery as conceptual tools with which to tackle cultural and aesthetic norms.

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Pop Impressions Europe/USA: Prints and Multiples from The Museum of Modern Art
February 18–May 18, 1999

This exhibition of approximately one hundred works, drawn entirely from the Museum's collection, highlights printmaking's vital role within the Pop aesthetic.

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Mary Lucier: Floodsongs
March 13–June 20, 1999

This video/audio installation presents images of residents of Grand Forks, North Dakota, speaking candidly of their lives before and after the flood of 1997.

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The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect
March 14–June 1, 1999

This exhibition is a survey of works in which artists, mostly of the present century, have addressed the museum, confronting its concept and function, commenting on its nature, drawing from its methods, and examining its relationship to the art it contains.

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Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture for a Large Wall and Other Recent Acquisitions
March 19–July 6, 1999

A monumental early masterwork by Ellsworth Kelly, created in 1957, has recently been given to the Museum. In its first presentation here, this stunning wall-relief sculpture is accompanied by key early drawings that show how the artist devised its underlying principles of composition, and by major Kelly paintings also recently donated to the Museum.

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Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper, 1963-1974
April 1–June 15, 1999

Including approximately 180 drawings and gouaches and some 20 sketchbooks, the exhibition emphasizes the spontaneous, subversive, and experimental nature of Polke's work.

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Projects 68: William Kentridge
April 15–June 8, 1999

Featuring the premiere of William Kentridge's most recent film animation.

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Alfred Hitchcock: Behind the Silhouette
April 16–August 17, 1999

Storyboards, set designs, film stills, and ephemera relating to the director's achievements.

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Collecting in Depth: Drawings by Grosz, Schwitters, Ernst, and Klee
May 13–July 20, 1999

This exhibition highlights the rich holdings of works by George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and Paul Klee in MoMA's collection.

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Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Print Collecting:
An Early Mission for MoMA
June 22–October 21, 1999

This exhibition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Print Room and includes approximately 100 of the nearly sixteen hundred prints Mrs. Rockefeller donated to the Museum from her private collection.

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The Un-Private House
July 1–October 5, 1999

The Un-Private House, the first project in the Lily Auchincloss Series of Architecture Exhibitions, examines 26 contemporary homes by a roster of prominent international architects whose designs reflect the evolution of the private house in response to recent architectural innovations and changing cultural conditions.

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Fame After Photography
July 8–October 5, 1999

Fame After Photography is an unconventional and timely exhibition that tracks how the public's fascination with fame was transformed by and has evolved since the invention of photography in 1839.

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Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century
July 22–September 21, 1999

This exhibition includes nine innovative automobiles designed to confront the growing social, economic, and environmental conditions facing the consumer and the automotive industry in the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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ModernStarts: People
October 7, 1999–February 1, 2000

ModernStarts: People explores aspects of figural representation in early modernism through several exhibition themes. Topics addressed in Composing with the Figure range from theatrical postures to the spatial relationship between the figure and its environment, and the reshaping or decomposition of the figure, with works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp. A thematic exhibition, Actors, Dancers, Bathers, traces the development of these genres from Paul Cézanne and André Derain to contemporary photography. The Language of the Body investigates gesture, portrait heads, and facial expressions in all mediums, including prints by Odilon Redon and Paul Klee. Posed to Unposed: Encounters with the Camera explores the development of figure compositions throughout the entire history of photography. Expression and the Series juxtaposes Auguste Rodin’s sculpted heads of Honoré de Balzac and Henri Matisse’s heads of his neighbor Jeanette Vaderin. Finally, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is an installation of large figurative sculptures.

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ModernStarts: Places
October 28, 1999–March 14, 2000

ModernStarts: Places demonstrates the broad interpretations of site, both real and imagined. Among the exhibition themes is Seasons and Moments, an evocative installation devoted to the epic landscape with works such as Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, Joan Miró’s The Birth of the World, Cy Twombly’s Four Seasons, and Vasily Kandinsky’s so-called Four Seasons, shown for the first time in a rotunda gallery as intended by the artist. Other exhibitions will explore themes such as: Changing Visions: French Landscape 1880–1920, as interpreted by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Georges-Pierre Seurat and accompanied by documentary photographs of the views depicted; and Landscape as Retreat: Gauguin to Nolde, a presentation of woodcuts by Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, and others on the broad theme of escape from urban life. These are contrasted with galleries devoted to an exploration of the urban realm, with works in various mediums. These range from a fin-de-siècle environment of furniture and objects, in Hector Guimard and the Art Nouveau Interior, to a documentation of the modern world in a largely photographic exhibition, Rise of the Modern World, that reveals the dynamism and underbelly of urban life and the industrial age. Unreal City, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and photographs, depicts the city, both interior and exterior, as a site of condensed and disrupted space, modern anxiety, and destabilized points of reference, and includes works by Giorgio de Chirico, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Lyonel Feininger, and Fernand Léger. Places includes a film series, The American Place: Landscape in the Early Western.

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ModernStarts: Things
November 18, 1999–March 14, 2000

ModernStarts: Things will explore the presentation and representation of ordinary objects, including still-life paintings, collages, constructed sculptures, prints, posters, furniture and design objects, and architectural fragments, in often unexpected juxtapositions. The transformation of changing pictorial conventions and notions of artistic originality in the early modern period underlie the various themes of this exhibition.

View the online project: 16 Objects, Ready or Not