Installation view at MoMA of Kwakuhlekisa. 2007. Stencil, dimensions variable. Publisher: the artist, Shaka’s Rock, South Africa. Edition: 3. The Museum of Modern Art. General Print Fund. © 2011 Cameron Platter. Photo by Thomas Greisel

I’m delighted to have my work included in the exhibition Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now at The Museum of Modern Art, and in MoMA’s collection. And I’m a real fan of what’s been done, and highlighted, in this show.

Day of Wrath. 1943. Denmark. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

These notes accompany the screenings of Carl Th. Dreyer’s </i>Day of Wrath</a> on July 6, 7, and 8 in Theater 3.</p>

Despite being one of the greatest film directors, Carl Th. Dreyer (1889–1968) will probably always be considered an acquired taste. His best films are much too austere and demanding for even many serious moviegoers.

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.

Even though there are advantages to living in this day and age—not dying of consumption or syphilis, transporting money in a wallet, rather than a wheelbarrow—I still fantasize about living in interwar Germany. Maybe it was far too many viewings of Cabaret as a child, but I’ve always carried an imagined nostalgia for the Weimar Republic (1919–1933): its loose social mores, the competing senses of optimism and doom, the passionate political struggles, and of course the edgy art and design. With MoMA’s German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse exhibition closing July 11, I thought we should have a look back at some of the great Weimar-era works in MoMA’s rich collection. This post is dedicated to Paul Jaskot, the professor who inspired my love of German art and design.

1. Unknown artist. Poster for Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin, Symphony of the Metropolis). 1927
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) lent a soundtrack to the Weimar Republic. This film, which MoMA screened in December 2010, portrays the life of a city mainly through visual effects and music, not narrative content. The impression it conveys of daily life in Berlin is dynamic, anxiety-ridden, cacophonous—and a helluva lot of fun!

2. Rudi Feld. The Danger of Bolshevism (Die Gefahr des Bolschewismus). 1919
This lithograph, included in German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, features a terrifying Death figure gripping a dagger in his teeth. The work reflects a common fear in the aftermath of the First World War—that the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia might spread to Germany, like a plague.

3. Marianne Brandt. Ashtray. 1924
The liberal Weimar Republic inspired a surge of radical experimentation in all the arts. Marianne Brandt was the head of the metal workshop at the German Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1929. The Bauhaus was a school, founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, famous for its visionary integration of technology, art, and design. This elegant ashtray from 1924 was based on pure geometrical forms, cylinder and spheres.

4. George Grosz. .a (recto): Circe .b (verso): Untitled. 1927
In this watercolor, also included in the German Expressionism exhibition, George Grosz critiques the ongoing economic disparities of Weimar society, in which the bourgeoisie could afford every pleasure—even the bodies of the lower classes. The unsentimental style of New Objectivity, pioneered by the likes of Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann, emerged in Germany in the 1920s to rival the utopian and romanticized sensibility of Expressionism.

5. Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus Stairway. 1932
Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway, an oil painting on canvas, depicts the interior of the Bauhaus. Schlemmer painted this work just one year before Hitler assumed power and the Nazis closed the visionary school. Schlemmer was among many Weimar-era artists persecuted by the Nazis for producing so-called “degenerate” art.

Installation view of Holding Pattern by interboro Partners, winner of the 2011 Young Architects Program, 2011. Digital rendering courtesy of Interboro Partners

Each year, MoMA renews its commitment to experimental architecture and architectural display with a full-scale installation of a project chosen from a competition among virtually untried architects. In the galleries of the Museum, architecture collection masterworks and temporary exhibitions of computer- and hand-drawn architectural renderings, models, photographs, and films are regularly shown. But each year the outdoor spaces of MoMA PS1 provide a unique temporary outdoor gallery where emerging talents can turn projects and drawings into spaces and palpable experiences.

The five teams have been working over the past week to incorporate feedback from their public Open Studios presentations at MoMA PS1 on June 18. Starting this week, you will be hearing from each of the teams every week until the next Open Studios on September 17, 2011, at MoMA PS1.

Beatriz González. Acuerdo bancario (Bank Agreement). 1980

While preparing the exhibition I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing, Christian Rattemeyer and I had a conversation with our colleagues Luis Pérez-Oramas and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães about the premise of the exhibition. They immediately suggested that we look at the work of Beatriz González, a leading figure among Latin American Pop artists and currently one the most influential living artists in Colombia, whose work explores sociopolitical subject matter specific to her country’s history and vernacular culture.

Beatriz González. Turbay condecorado (Turbay honored). 1980

Like many of the works in the exhibition, including Marine Hugonnier’s series Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly), Robert Morris’s untitled gouache paintings on newsprint, and On Kawara’s storage boxes for his date paintings lined with local newspaper clippings, there is a direct link between González’s work and the newspaper and print culture. When Julio César Turbay Ayala became president of Colombia in 1979, González turned her sketchbook into a visual diary of sorts, producing a simple, stylized drawing each day based on the daily media coverage of his presidency. Her stated intent was to become a type of “court painter,” and to critically document the spectacle of leadership. Made between 1979 and 1981, these drawings—fragmentary depictions of Turbay attending sessions of Congress, meeting with church, government, and military personnel, and engaging in leisure activities—provide an intimate look at the disparate public aspects of power. These works are prime examples of the artist’s straightforward use of drawing in her artistic production, and mark a significant and more politically charged change in her work towards a more explicit reflection on the growing violence and turmoil that engulfed Colombia throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Beatriz González. Turbay esquiando (Turbay Skiing). 1980

Visitors tour MoMA's galleries. Photo: Martin Seck. Shown, from left: David Smith. Australia. 1951. Painted steel on cinder block base. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of William Rubin. Mark Rothko. No. 5/No. 22. 1950 (dated on reverse 1949). Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of the artist. © 2011 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In a city like New York, it’s pretty easy to become jaded—we live in one of the most dynamic places in the world and can easily fall into a “tell me something I don’t know” attitude. And after nearly 30 years here, 13 of them working at MoMA, I definitely am prone to it myself at times; when you can walk past The Starry Night on your way to the staff caffeteria or sit in the shade of Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk on your lunch break, it’s easy to start thinking of your surroundings as just that: surroundings.

What do you get when you put a group of artists together on a condemned pier beneath the Brooklyn Bridge? No, this isn’t a joke, but the colorfully bizarre origin story of that renowned laboratory of contemporary art, MoMA PS1.

In this final installment of our two-part campfire chat, artist Laurel Nakadate cozies up and talks to the MoMA Teens about growing up in Iowa, the rights of teenagers vs. adults, what her family thinks about her art, and her personal and artistic reaction to the events of 9/11.