1913 was a landmark year—a moment of highly concentrated, seemingly boundless innovation. Developments in the fields of science, technology, art, music, literature, and philosophy signaled a radical shift in the cultural landscape. 1913 is a particularly important year within the history of modern art, marked by events and objects that would fundamentally change the way art was conceived and understood. On February 17 of that year, the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art, commonly referred to as the Armory Show, opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan. Organized by a small group of American artists, this show introduced the American public to the recent developments of the European avant-garde. There, for the first time, Americans encountered the work of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and many other European artists, exhibited alongside their American avant-garde counterparts, such as Marsden Hartley, Morgan Russell, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

To celebrate the centennial of this watershed moment, The Museum of Modern Art is producing a series of videos highlighting important works from 1913 in MoMA’s collection. Featuring curators from all areas of the Museum speaking about their favorite objects in the collection made in 1913, these videos will be published throughout 2013 and cumulatively accessible on this blog and MoMA website, so be sure check back often for updates.

Up first in the video above: Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, on Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 masterpiece Dynamism of a Soccer Player, currently on view in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925.

So stay tuned for videos on Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, and Happy Anniversary!

Want to learn more about 1913? WNYC has put together a one-hour documentary, “Culture Shock 1913,” as well as related podcasts, and you can enjoy music from this period with “Reinventing Music, 1910–1925,” created by Q2 Music, WQXR’s online station for 20th- and 21st-century classical music, in collaboration with MoMA. Listen to a complete playlist and live streaming of these exclusive concerts (on February 26 and March 4) at MoMA at wqxr.org/q2music.