Victor D’Amico, Director, Department of Education, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. undated. Department of Public Information Records, II.C.54. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
The Victor D’Amico Papers are now processed and open for researchers to use onsite, by appointment at the Museum Archives reading room in Long Island City, Queens. The collection’s finding aid (inventory) is searchable online from any web-enabled device, along with MoMA’s other archival collections.
Installation view of Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets at The Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Photo © 2012 Jason Mandella
This summer I served as a curatorial intern assisting curator Ron Magliozzi on the exhibition Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets. My first brush with the Quay brothers, perhaps like most visitors to the Museum’s new retrospective, was entirely tangential.
In the video interview above, filmmaker Youssef Chebbi shares some of the behind-the-scenes stories around Babylon, the feature-length non-fiction film he co-directed with ismaël [sic] and Ala Eddin Slim.
Teens assisting with Dean Moss’s Voluntaries performance at MoMA
Recently, a group of our In the Making and Cross-Museum Collective teen alumni were given the opportunity to assist choreographer Dean Moss as he finished his preparations for Voluntaries (created in collaboration with visual artist Laylah Ali), for MoMA’s recent dance performance series Some sweet day.
The Department of Education continuously seeks new ways to increase visitor engagement with art. It’s exciting to brainstorm ideas with colleagues, test them out, and see the most promising ideas put into practice.
MoMA Design Studio‘s little designer, Sky Chu. Photo by Martin Seck
A few months ago, my team and I here at MoMA had the challenge of designing the title wall for the exhibition Century of the Child: Growing By Design, 1900–2000, a broad survey of 20th-century design for children with “children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking.” When we met with the curators, Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, they suggested trying a less formal approach for the design of the title wall, perhaps using handwriting. So two of our experienced designers spent two days experimenting with every type of handwriting font and non-digital handwriting they could think of. The results were good, but not quite right. It was clear to us that we needed to take a different approach. That’s when we suddenly realized, what could be better than having an actual child help us? And that’s how my 6-year-old son Sky became a MoMA designer. He sat down at the dinner table one night, wrote out the title of the exhibition three times, and then said, “done.” So it was. And after we enlarged the text, we realized the average letter height is as tall as Sky himself—3 feet, 9 inches!
The little designer leaping in front of his work, and one of his own alphabets. Photos by Martin Seck and Ingrid Chou
The transcripts of the Oral History Program have long been a central part of The Museum of Modern Art Archives, known to many in scholarly circles as an unrivaled primary source for the collective memory of MoMA’s history.
A MoMA visitor examines Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. (New York, 1951 [third version, after lost original of 1913]. Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp)
Looking at modern and contemporary art can provoke a lot of questions. Struggling to understand or relate to it is not unusual, and in fact many artists view those reactions as part of the art. Marcel Duchamp famously said that “the creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
We left off in our last post having explained the research and assessment that precedes any conservation treatment. Using Echo as our object of study, we examined questions that arise after looking closely at a painting. Let’s delve into one such question.
Example of an “information packet,” comprised of various related items, that Seth Siegelaub stapled together
One of the challenging and fundamental responsibilities an archivist faces in his or her work is determining the “original order” of a person or organization’s records.
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