Andrew Wyeth. Christina’s World. 1948. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2012 Andrew Wyeth
In 1949 The Museum of Modern Art acquired a modest-sized landscape painting from the Macbeth Gallery on 57th Street in New York City for $1,800—then considered a hefty sum for an artwork. The painting would go on to become one of the most recognized images in American art,
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.
Comprising more than 53,000 artworks, the collection of MoMA’s Department of Prints and Illustrated Books tells the story of modern and contemporary art through editions: art objects that can exist in more than one copy. As you might guess from the name of the department, the vast majority of these are works on paper; however, the collection also represents the rich tradition of three-dimensional editions, known as multiples.
MoMA Media Lounge. 2012. Designed by Renée Green. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2012 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Thomas Griesel
Upon arriving as the new Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA about two years ago, I was determined to focus on the acquisition of unique installations and draw a more complete narrative of media and performance art through its representation in videos and photographs in MoMA’s collection and exhibitions.
In the video interview above, filmmaker Damien Ounouri talks about his film Fidaï, which inaugurated the film exhibition Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s to Now, Part III
Trisha Donnelly installing Gallery 22 on the fourth floor of the Museum (artist’s back is to the camera)
In the audio slide show above, photographer Anne Collier talks about her work featured in New Photography 2012.
In the audio slideshow above, the Shanghai-based artists Ji Weiyu and Song Tao, who work together under the collective name Birdhead, talk about their installation in MoMA’s New Photography 2012 exhibition.
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
Tottenville High School Marching Band leading the audience out of the Child in the City of Play symposium through MoMA Studio: Common Senses. Photo by Sarah Kennedy
It’s not often that you leave a symposium feeling more awake than when you started, but that was certainly the case for every attendee and participant of last week’s The Child in the City of Play: Growing by Design
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