INSIDE/OUT: A MoMA/MoMA PS1 BLOG

Note signed by James Riddle (American, born 1933). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008

We found this note attached to an object shrouded in tissue and quarantined within three Ziploc bags. Read more

David Brooks. Terra Incognitae—Rainforest Canopy (Cronos version) (installation at the Sculpture Center through July 27, 2010). 2010. Photo courtesy of the artist

How much can you say about a work of art in twenty-five seconds? That’s the challenge we posed to ten artists whose work is featured in Greater New York 2010, on view through October 18, 2010, at MoMA PS1. Last Wednesday, we invited five of these artists to join us at MoMA for the first session of Greater New York 2010: Artists Present, a two-part public program wherein artists in the show are invited to give the public a behind-the-scenes look at their work and their creative processes using a twenty-image PowerPoint presentation. The catch? Each image is only onscreen for twenty-five seconds, and the artists don’t have control of the slideshow! It’s almost like art speed-dating! Read more

Walter Huston as our sixteenth President in Abraham Lincoln. 1930. USA. Directed by D. W. Griffith

These notes accompany screenings of D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, June 30 and July 1 and 2 in Theater 3.

D. W. Griffith (1874–1948) came to the end of his professional road in 1931. It is now time both to bury and praise him.

He remained an enigma to the end. His final feature, The Struggle (1931), was a passionate plea against alcohol made by a committed, unredeemable, and self-destructive drunk, and if Abraham Lincoln (1930) was intended as some sort of apologia for The Birth of a Nation (1915), the director seems to have missed the point of the outrage he inspired. Read more

In this video, mixed-media artist Xaviera Simmons talks about her work and her striking new photo installation, Superunknown (Alive In The), currently on view in Greater New York, MoMA PS1‘s quinquennial showcase of works made in the past five years by artists and collectives living and working in the metropolitan New York area. Read more

Victor D'Amico. Photograph by David E Scherman

I often to try to imagine what it was like for MoMA’s first director of education, Victor D’Amico, to build a new, expansive education program dedicated to art with a radically different modern aesthetic at a time when the public was hard hit by the Great Depression. Read more

How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view throughout the Museum. If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—next Friday, along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S CHALLENGE: Read more

Hilla Rebay in her Carnegie Hall studio, 1935. The Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archives. Photo: Eugene Hutchinson.

I first discovered Hilla Rebay while reading a fascinating book about the life of Peggy Guggenheim, Mistress of Modernism by Mary V. Dearborn, who happened to be my office mate while I was New York City Scholar at the Heyman Center for Humanities at Columbia University several years ago. Peggy’s life was filled with a cast of interesting art world characters, but Hilla Rebay was clearly someone I needed to know more about. Read more

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Rendering of Pole Dance at MoMA PS1. Designed by Solid Objectives–Idenburg Liu (SO–IL). Photo courtesy SO–IL

Every summer weekend, thousands of people pour into MoMA PS1’s courtyard to enjoy the best in art, architecture, and music during the weekly Warm Up parties. As the winner of this year’s Young Architects Program competition, which provides the setting for Warm Up, we took the opportunity to further contemporary explorations of architecture’s potential to create sensory-charged environments, rather than finite forms.

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Robert Ryman. Classico 5. 1968

My colleagues in the Department of Drawings and I are often asked about our criteria for defining what a drawing is. The short answer is that a drawing is typically defined as any unique (non-print) work of art with a paper material support. Taking this question one step further, I often think: Why did the artist use paper and not, for instance, a canvas? In what ways do the materials used by an artist lend themselves to the work, and how do they play out in the composition itself? Read more

Blackmail. 1929. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

These notes accompany screenings of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, June 23, 24, and 25 in Theater 2.

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) is the leading example of a commercially successful film director who never lost his taste for innovation and experimentation. He must be something of an anathema to those on the avant-garde fringes of film whose whole career may not attract the audiences that Psycho (1960) or The Birds (1963) could garner in a single day. Yet, his body of work remains extremely personal and unified in its vision of a precarious universe. Read more