MoMA | Author: Samantha Friedman

Posts by Samantha Friedman

February 16, 2012 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions

A Few More Ways of Looking at a Keith Haring

Posted by Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Keith Haring. Untitled. 1982. Ink on two sheets of paper, sheet: 72 x 671 1/2" (182.9 x 1705.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Estate of Keith Haring, Inc. © 2012 The Keith Haring Foundation

The monumental 1982 Keith Haring drawing Untitled is not often on view, so its inclusion in the Museum’s current installation Contemporary Galleries: 1980–Now seems like an ideal opportunity to think about how this artist’s iconic visual language fits into the larger story of 20th-century art.

October 20, 2011 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions

To Collect

Posted by Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Richard Serra. Verb List. 1967–68. Graphite on paper, 2 sheets, each 10 x 8" (25.4 x 20.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist in honor of Wynn Kramarsky. © 2011 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Drawing is a verb,” the artist Richard Serra once said. An important new acquisition for MoMA’s Department of Drawings, Serra’s Verb List (1967–68) serves as a kind of manifesto for this pronouncement.

March 24, 2011 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions

Body Language

Posted by Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Two recent acquisitions on view in the exhibition I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing, which just opened in the Drawings Galleries, prove that text-based art need not be disembodied. While On Kawara‘s series of telegrams sent to his Dutch gallerist—one of which lent the show its title—used neutral typewriting, modest scale, and the simplest of phrases to attest to a human presence, works by Fiona Banner and Paul Chan assert corporeality through scrawled handwriting, imposing size, and thick, evocative diction. This is art that describes the body at the same time that it re-creates it.

February 3, 2011 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions

Guston & Feldman: A Double View

Posted by Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

The 1958 Philip Guston drawing Head – Double View is currently on view in The Big Picture, the fourth-floor installment of MoMA’s Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition. One floor down, in the complementary show Ideas Not Theories: Artists and the Club, 1942-1962, the black-on-white composition appears again, this time on the cover of an album by the American composer Morton Feldman. Feldman—who was friends with many of the artists associated with the New York School, Guston in particular—featured the drawing on the jacket of his 1959 Columbia Masterworks release New Directions in Music 2.

September 30, 2010 | Collection & Exhibitions

Dehner-Mania

Posted by Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Sometimes you can palpably feel excitement building for an artist. It might be a rising star from Los Angeles who works in drawing and video, or a Brooklyn-based painter featured in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1 and about to break through. It is less often a woman artist of the New York School, whose presence in MoMA’s collection has heretofore consisted of one drawing, two prints, and a small tabletop sculpture, and who has been dead for sixteen years.

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