When you hear teens open a question with “I want to know, ’cause I want to be a director,” you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing—why you choose to stay at work late on Friday evenings, why you spend your time off screening films, why you pour over the DVD extras to learn as much as you can about a film’s context. For years now, artist and educator Alejandro Duran and Anne Morra, an associate curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, have been doing just that to guide young artists in the dissection and interpretation of some of the world’s great films.

Posts by Nathan Sensel
Five for Friday: Fragmented Figures
Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.
Don’t want to get squished in the crowds at MoMA while trying to sketch from your favorite work? Feeling like you need some inspiration to get you back into drawing? Then this Five for Friday is for you.
Lady Gaga Did Not Attend This Opening
You probably didn’t hear about the huge exhibition opening last week at MoMA—it didn’t make the front page of The New York Times Arts or Style sections; no one was interviewed on NPR about it; no pictures of the artists appeared on Art Fag City. And yet it was definitely the place to be if you are interested in mingling with the freshest faces in contemporary art.
Getting Attention: A Young Filmmaker’s Beginnings at MoMA
For the past ten years, high school students have been attending free Friday night film screenings at MoMA, spending some time after each film talking with curators, educators, and filmmakers. Recently we’ve experimented with different types of events for teens, such as artists’ talks, gallery activities, and art-making workshops, which means there’s something happening for young artists almost every Friday from October through May. Greeting visitors as they arrive for these events is an impeccably dressed young filmmaker named Michael Brawley, who has been an essential part of the program—first as an attendee, then as a volunteer—for years. We asked Michael his opinion about film, the Oscars, MoMA’s Teen Programs, and more.
PopArt Wins a People’s Voice Webby Award!
Congratulations to the teens from the MoMA Teen Voices Project for their hard work on the website PopArt, which recently won a People’s Voice Webby in the Art category. The Teen Voices Project (formerly the Youth Advisory Council), a group of sixteen students from New York City high schools, collaborated with MoMA Staff to design the interactive site.
Faced with the challenge of creating an educational resource that other teens could use to engage with MoMA, the team started by learning about and analyzing existing interactive educational activities, websites, and technology-based communication projects. After countless debates on the purpose of education, the coolest parts of MoMA, and strategies to make MoMA more accessible to teens, the team identified a vision for their project: to create an online tool for people of all ages to interact with and respond to modern art, to reveal unexpected connections between works of art, and to trust in their own “gut” feelings about art.
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