Celebrating 10 Years of R&D Salons

Over the past 10 years, MoMA’s Research and Development Salon series has tackled provocative and unexpected questions in design with MoMA staff members, community activists, scholars, artists, and more. The Salons began as a way to explore museums’ responsibility to local communities and to society at large, and became an opportunity to shine a spotlight on topics that might otherwise be ignored. Below we share 10 of our favorites from the last decade.

Michael Hirschorn cuts through the perceptions of “high” and “low” culture

Salon 4: High and Low, April 18, 2013

in Salon 4: High and Low, Michael Hirschorn, executive producer of pop-culture TV staples like Flavor of Love, explored a question that, 10 years later, remains central to our cultural institutions: How do we tell “good” and “bad” culture apart? In pointing out that definitions of highbrow and lowbrow have a long association with systems of power and control, Hirschorn forces us to contend with our role in upholding these structures—and suggests how new technologies can help break them down.

Roy Lichtenstein. Sweet Dreams, Baby! from 11 Pop Artists, Volume III. 1965, published 1966

Kate Crawford peeks behind the curtain of artificial intelligence

Salon 10: The Object, Connected, October 14, 2014

A scholar of large-scale data systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, Kate Crawford has focused on understanding these systems in the broader contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. Salon 10: The Object, Connected was the third in a series that considered the object in various states—online, offline, and connected—and featured presentations from speakers including Neri Oxman and K8 Hardy. Crawford speaks about contemporary artists who use surveillance and data collection technology, and considers whether their work is upending the status quo or simply participating in it. She leaves us with a simple question: “Is it revealing systems to us that we previously couldn’t understand, or is it simply another way of giving people the ultimate God’s-eye view?”

Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler. Anatomy of an AI System. 2018

Tricia Wang introduces us to our many selves

Salon 16: Fluid States of America, September 16, 2015

Trevor Paglen. It Began as a Military Experiment. 2017

The Internet has changed our relationship to ourselves. In her 2015 presentation at Salon 16: Fluid States of America, tech ethnographer Tricia Wang teased out ways in which networks allow us to explore our identities through the numerous digital “informal spaces” we occupy. She described how the ability to represent ourselves anonymously on networked sites like Tumblr or Twitter gives rise to an “elastic self” that can stretch, shape-shift, and express a self that, offline, may be repressed or even taboo. As networks and the identities that populate them become interconnected across digital geographies, Wang questions whether the malleability offered by these spaces will endure. Listen to new audio from Tricia Wang below.

Elijah Anderson tackles the perceptions of progress

Salon 17: Hybridity: The Space In-Between, November 3, 2015

Drawing together theories from his work in sociology and urban ethnography, Elijah Anderson’s presentation at Salon 17: Hybridity: The Space In-Between outlined how racial barriers continue to define our urban spaces. He highlights how the ideal of cities as bastions of civility conflicts with the continually pervasive notion of the “Black ghetto.” Unable to escape this history, “the Black body moves about in the larger society with a deficit of credibility.” According to Anderson, this corrosive division between some people’s idyllic metropolis and others’ discomfiting reality continues to sow the seeds of unrest and conflict.

Homi K. Bhabha asks, “What is white male culture?”

Salon 30: White Male, March 25, 2019

In Salon 30: White Male, Homi K. Bhabha broke the term “white male” down into its component parts. Deriving from a long history of Eurocentrism, whiteness has stood for the notion of the unmarked, natural, or national cultural sign, and assumes that all other forms of identity are seen in relation to it. Maleness, on the other hand, beyond its definition as a gender identity, becomes a stand-in for cultural dichotomies such as efficiency vs. ethic, action vs. means, achievement vs. judgment, and speed vs. reflection. Bhabha goes on to discuss the culture that is generated when these terms come together in the concept of the “white male.”

Omer Fast. White Male Selfies (for Parkett no. 99). 2017

Stephanie Dinkins finds cultural erasure at the vanguard of artificial intelligence

Salon 24: AI – Artificial Imperfection, April 3, 2018

After stumbling on a YouTube video of one of the world’s most advanced social robots, contemporary artist Stephanie Dinkins embarked on a project to understand and befriend BINA48, an experiment in artificial intelligence. A humanoid robot, BINA48 was trained using the experiences, memories, actions, and thoughts of a living Black woman. What Dinkins discovered was a skin-deep facsimile lacking the faculties and insights that she expected from an African American. This led Dinkins to question how minority experience and culture is being used in digital preservation methods. In Salon 24: AI – Artificial Imperfection, Dinkins asked: If algorithms and AI are trained with data that does not represent all of us, are we witnessing a mass cultural erasure?

Gauri Gill. Untitled from the series Acts of Appearance. 2015–ongoing

Lindsey Farrar talks about Western culture’s aversion to Black people’s natural hair

Salon 33: Hair, October 17, 2019

Lindsey Farrar helped start CRWNMAG to address the misrepresentation, and lack of representation, of Black Americans. “Just seeing yourself and your hair as it grows out of your head reflected in images confirms that you exist,” she says. Farrar admits that the landscape has changed since the magazine started in 2016, but insists that much more needs to be done to address the systemic bias toward straight hair. As she explained in Salon 33: Hair, for Black Americans hair can be a matter of life or death. Listen to new audio from Lindsey Farrar below.

Hank Willis Thomas. Kama Mama, Kama Binti (Like Mother, Like Daughter), 1971. 2008

Shaun Leonardo unmasks anger disguised as fear

Salon 34: Anger, December 10, 2019

Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary art practice explores societal expectations and the ramifications of manhood—especially as it is defined in Black and brown communities. He discovered that these expectations are connected to an inability to feel fear, and realized that “anger is a disguise for fear…allowing you to block the pain and vulnerability that goes with it.” Breaking through this barrier lies at the heart of the project Leonardo discussed in his presentation at Salon 34: Anger. Working with the Guggenheim Museum, he convened four groups of participants, each with a different relationship to gun violence, and guided them through a workshop relying on choreography. Ultimately, in the Guggenheim’s atrium, the groups engaged in a debate using dance.

Tania Bruguera speaks about Cuba’s possible 21st-century revolution

Salon 36: Renaissance or Revolution, November 15, 2021

As both an artist and an activist, Tania Bruguera weaves together contemporary Cuban politics and history in her performances and installations. On November 21, 2021, Cubans and their supporters around the world planned a demonstration against the island nation’s government, rounding out a summer of protests spurred by economic hardship, restrictions on civil liberties, and food shortages. In the preceding months, the Cuban government responded with crackdowns and arrests, like those Bruguera endured a few years earlier. Speaking at Salon 36: Renaissance or Revolution on the night of the protest, Bruguera responded to the ongoing conflict in real time.

Read a related interview with Tania Bruguera in Magazine.

Nanfu Wang keeps a watchful eye on the global reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic

Salon 37: Breath, February 16, 2022

After her discovery of information about a mysterious viral outbreak on Chinese websites in January 2020, Nanfu Wang trained her documentarian’s eye on what became the global COVID-19 pandemic. Two years later, during Salon 37: Breath, she recounted directing at her studio in New Jersey while her production team and family members sent footage and stories from the pandemic’s epicenter. By comparing those dispatches with footage she captured closer to home, Wang revealed the twin failures of the world’s most powerful nations: the US and China. How can we endure a crisis that punctures our illusions about individual freedom and national control when our very lives are at stake? And how do we rebuild in the aftermath?

Read a related interview with Nanfu Wang in Magazine.

Pope.L. Foraging (The Air Itself/Dark Version). 1995