My Heart Is on the Left

Nov 23, 2024–Jan 22, 2025

MoMA

Gisela Montalvo. Flower Animal Cat Snails Turtles Rose Rabbits Babies. 2024. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.Image description: A horizontally oriented painting with vibrant swathes of red, blue, yellow, green, and pink across the canvas all the way to the edges. Layers of looping lines painted in blue, yellow, pink, white, and black move across the canvas, with a few subtle drawings of cats found within the colorful composition.
  • Education Center, Mezzanine The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building

Founded by the nonprofit AHRC New York City, ArTech Collective is a progressive art studio that provides opportunities for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities to express themselves creatively and expand their practice through artistic development. ArTech empowers artists by providing studio spaces, art supplies, and access to a community of peers and mentors.

Over the past year, ArTech Collective artists from studio locations in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens participated in an extended partnership with MoMA’s Access Programs. In weekly sessions with a MoMA teaching artist, groups explored a diverse range of artists in the Museum’s collection and experimented with various materials and techniques to create the works on view. The artists also attended title and artist-statement workshops, further developing their professional practices and sharing their perspectives through texts alongside the artworks. The title of this exhibition, My Heart Is on the Left, was developed by a participant during a writing workshop. Merging poetics and direct description, the phrase is a reminder that art has the power to connect us through individual expression and universal truths.

Organized by Theresa Rodewald, Associate Educator, and Lara Schweller, Associate Educator, Access Programs and Initiatives, MoMA, in collaboration with MoMA teaching artists Dounia Bendris, Rachel Cohen, and Jamie Mirabella; and Pola-Ana Mora, Program Director, ArTech Collective, Magdalena Kosciuch, Project Coordinator, Carlos Encarnacion Vazquez, Lead Teaching Artist, and Darinka Vlahek, Director of Program Services, AHRC New York City.

The Adobe Foundation is proud to support equity, learning, and creativity at MoMA.

Access and community programs are supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

Major funding is provided by The Taft Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Sarah K. de Coizart Article TENTH Perpetual Charitable Trust, the Allene Reuss Memorial Trust, the Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Fund for Older Adults at MoMA in honor of Agnes Gund, the J.E. and Z.B. Butler Foundation, the Megara Foundation, The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., The Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation, and the Annual Education Fund.

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].