MoMA
April 18, 2011  |  Events & Programs, Videos
Community Partner Art Show: The Video

Last summer, the Community Partner Art Show opening celebrated the participants and the amazing organizations that we work with through our Community Partnership Program. It was a fantastic exhibition, and it was so powerful hearing the participating artists discuss the ideas, inspirations, and, yes, hesitations surrounding their involvement with the Museum and the creation of their artworks. I hope you enjoy the video above, which documents this exciting event.

April 15, 2011  |  Do You Know Your MoMA?
Do You Know Your MoMA? 4/15/11

How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view in the Museum’s Painting and Sculpture and Architecture and Design galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in one month (on Friday, May 13).

ANSWERS TO THE MARCH 18 CHALLENGE:

The Gadgetry of the Commons

Grete Schütte-Lihotzky’s 1926–27 Frankfurt Kitchen incorporated socialist ideology into its efficient design. But it assumed a private kitchen. During a brief period shortly afterwards, idealistic Soviet architects took the idea one step further, experimenting with communal kitchens.

April 13, 2011  |  Artists, Collection & Exhibitions
Seth Price’s Riff on New Jack Swing

Seth Price. 2002. From Sound Collector Audio Review magazine, issue #3

If Robert Smithson saw the world as a museum, artists of Seth Price’s generation see the “www” as theirs. For them, the gallery can be anything: they project a film and play music in a gallery, so the question of where in that jumble of everything they want to make their work is a difficult one. The Web is both a cabinet of curiosities and a studio where viewers are invited in to see their latest endeavors.

April 12, 2011  |  I Went to MoMA and
“I went to MoMA and…”: The Kids Are All Right
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The "I went to MoMA and..." project in action in the MoMA lobby

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Flights of fancy, lively drawings, dreams of piloting the Bell helicopter, disdain for a museum with no dinosaurs… many of our absolute favorite “MoMA stories” were left by kids, from toddlers to teenagers. So for our second post about the “I went to MoMA and…” project, it wasn’t hard to pick a theme.

April 12, 2011  |  An Auteurist History of Film
Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator

The Great Dictator. 1940. USA. Directed, produced, and written by Charles Chaplin

The Great Dictator. 1940. USA. Directed, produced, and written by Charles Chaplin


These notes accompany the screenings of Charles Chaplin’s </i>The Great Dictator</a> on April 13, 14, and 15 in Theater 3.</p>

The Great Dictator presents unique problems for the historian trying to reconcile Bosley Crowther’s judgment in 1940 that Charles Chaplin’s movie was “perhaps the most significant film ever produced” with the film’s occasionally flawed execution of Chaplin’s grand and noble conception. Because Chaplin (1889–1977) was a universally recognized and beloved personality—whose famous moustache had been stolen by an equally well-known, but far less beloved, comedian-cum-tyrant—his film about Hitler became an event of worldwide consequence.

Living Art: MoMA Teens Collaborate with Artist Paula Hayes

Paula Hayes and the Art and Science teens working on our living sculptures

What does it mean to own an artwork that will never look the same from one month to the next? And how does an ever-changing, living sculpture tweak our preconceptions of what it means to conserve an artwork for posterity?

Contemporary Artists on Abstract Expressionist New York

Artist Amy Sillman as she begins her talk in the Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition.

When we visit MoMA we expect to see works of art made by artists, but seldom do we hear firsthand from the artists themselves about the works on display—while we stand directly in front of them! The recently concluded series Abstract Expressionist New York: Artist-Led Gallery Talks offered MoMA visitors this unique opportunity.

In the Artist’s Space: Helen Mirren on Vasily Kandinsky

While Dame Helen Mirren was in New York to film her movie Arthur—a remake of the 1981 Dudley Moore classic—she graciously agreed to do a video interview at The Museum of Modern Art. Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit (and they still are).

April 6, 2011  |  Collection & Exhibitions
At the Crossroads of Art and Sound in the 1980s

TELLUSTools. 2001. Double-LP. Inside cover Art by Christian Marclay

TELLUSTools. 2001. Double-LP. Composition: 12 1/4 x 24 5/8\

Long before the days of turntables and synthesizers, the composer John Cage revolutionized the way art saw music and music saw art with pieces like the infamous “4:33,” in which he took the stage, sat at the piano, prepared to play, and then sat in silence for four minutes and 33 seconds before exiting the stage. The legacy of Cage’s work is alive in many of the pieces on view in Looking at Music 3.0</a>, particularly in the work of Brian Eno, David Byrne, Christian Marclay, and John Zorn. Like Cage, these artists were invested in experimental composition and built their careers at the nexus between fine art, music, and performance.