For the past ten years, high school students have been attending free Friday night film screenings at MoMA, spending some time after each film talking with curators, educators, and filmmakers. Recently we’ve experimented with different types of events for teens, such as artists’ talks, gallery activities, and art-making workshops, which means there’s something happening for young artists almost every Friday from October through May. Greeting visitors as they arrive for these events is an impeccably dressed young filmmaker named Michael Brawley, who has been an essential part of the program—first as an attendee, then as a volunteer—for years. We asked Michael his opinion about film, the Oscars, MoMA’s Teen Programs, and more.

The nine screens in the Museum lobby are the initial entry points to the transitional experience produced by the Museum, which one could call a “non-event”—a preamble to the main visual consumption. This liminal trajectory incorporates the programmed infographics, the public architectural spaces, and the anticipating visitors in our sight lines. The “non-event” sets up an atmosphere of expectation in transit, through which our screen-conditioned, lifestyle-oriented, transient gazes turns us into unmitigated imitations of each other, not unlike the walk on airport walkways or the movement through vertical mall escalators.

These notes accompany the screening of </i>Arsenal, May 19, 20, and 21 in Theater 3.</p>

The triumvirate of great silent Soviet narrative directors is completed by Alexander Dovzhenko (1894–1956). Unlike the other two, Sergei Eisenstein and V. I. Pudovkin, Dovzhenko was Ukrainian and worked mostly in Odessa and Kiev, which allowed him a bit more freedom as he wasn’t constantly under Stalin’s nose in Moscow. Like his esteemed contemporaries, he left behind extensive writings on the cinema. His concern for peasants, a group to which his illiterate father belonged, led him away from urban settings and promoted a lyrical and poetic depiction of Nature. His great rural trilogy (Arsenal in 1929, Zemlya [Earth] in 1930, and Ivan in 1932) seems to move beyond the immediate political concerns of the Revolution into a personal and emotional realm; feeling triumphs over agitprop.

In previous posts we’ve showcased exhibition and wayfinding graphic developments and looked at interesting ephemera created by the Graphic Design department throughout MoMA’s past. This post is about a much more humble, but extremely important, type of design: the warning sign. These signs are created for a wide range of purposes—to prevent overcrowding in the galleries, to prevent damage to the artwork or Museum spaces, to alert people about potentially controversial artworks in the galleries, etc.—and they represent a collaboration between Graphic Design and the Curatorial, Legal, Visitor Services, and/or Education departments. Some signs, such as room-capacity notices, are required by law; others, such as the “warning” notices at the entrance to the Marina Abramović exhibition, are more of a courtesy. They all have one thing in common: they’re designed to make sure each guest has a safe and fun time at MoMA. The slide show above includes just a few of the signs we’ve made over the years. Enjoy… at your own risk!

How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden—in the hopes that warm weather will soon be here to stay. So put on your summer shoes and make for the garden. If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—next Friday, along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S CHALLENGE:

Hmm, not a lot of participation this week. Is the Architecture and Design collection too challenging? We didn’t have a winner, but Petra Vancova gets an honorable mention for identifying five of the six clues—the fifth clue was Cartesian Wax, from the Materialecology project by Neri Oxman and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1. Samuel Cabot Cochran, Benjamin Wheeler Howes, SMIT Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology and LLC.  GROW. 2005

2. nendo and Oki Sato. Cabbage Chair. 2007

3. Noémi Raymond. Circles Printed Fabric. c.1939-40

4. Tokujin Yoshioka. Pane Chair. 2003

5. Neri Oxman, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cartesian Wax, from the Materialecology project. 2007

6. Philip Vincent and Phil Irving. Vincent-HRD Series C Black Shadow Motorcycle. 1949

We recently travelled through Lisbon, Porto, and beyond to find products for our eighth Destination: Design collection, which introduces designers and design themes from around the world. This year’s collection—Destination: Portugal—highlights lifestyle products usually found only in Portugal, and the selection process was an exciting journey for us. We had a number of partners for the project, including Ministry of Culture, Portugal; TemaHome; Turismo de Portugal; aicep Portugal Global; and Fundação de Serralves, who helped introduce us to Portuguese designers, artisans, and manufacturers creating everything from umbrellas and filigree jewelry to furniture, teapots, weather predictors, and notebooks.

During recent months, Fluxus has begun making waves in MoMA galleries. This past October, Fluxus Preview opened on the fourth floor and continues to provide a sampling of the diverse activities carried out by artists engaged with a rebellious approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, true to Fluxus’s irreverent sensibility, derrières—hundreds of female asses—have taken over a space on the third floor of the Museum. The work is Yoko Ono and George Maciunas’s Fluxus Wallpaper, which repeats black-and-white close-ups of a human behind from floor to ceiling.

A still from Ono’s Film Number 4 (Bottoms), this wallpapered image is of one of the (allegedly) 365 individuals who walked for the artist’s camera in London during the early 1960s. As Ono once described Film Number 4, it is “like an aimless petition signed by people with their anuses”—a collective mooning in support of the absurd. Maciunas took one of these signature back ends, possibly Ono’s own, and printed it in fashion that enabled the provocation to occupy any receptive surface.

The wallpaper is part of The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, acquired in 2008. It is currently on display in conjunction with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.

On Thursday, April 22, the MoMA Library and Esopus Foundation Ltd. co-hosted an evening celebrating the life and work of physicist-artist Bern Porter (1911–2004). I organized the event to breathe life into the books and other ephemera on display in the exhibition Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library and to call more attention to this fascinating and under-recognized artist.

These notes accompany the screening of </i>The Docks of New York, May 12, 13, and 14 in Theater 3.</p>

Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) divided his childhood between his native Vienna and Queens, New York. Before going to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, he learned the rudiments of filmmaking at the studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and in the Army Signal Corps during the Great War. His first film, The Salvation Hunters (1925), was amazingly accomplished, especially considering its miniscule budget. It was, in essence, an independent film, an almost unique specimen in its time. Only the good fortune of capturing the eyes of Douglas Fairbanks and Charles Chaplin brought Sternberg out of obscurity and to the attention of the studios. Of his nine silent films, only four survive. These other works (Underworld, The Last Command, and The Docks of New York) are so good that one must conclude that Sternberg’s career, more than that of any other director, suffers from the blight on film history we have come think of as “lost-film syndrome.” In a pattern set by The Salvation Hunters, his films deal with complex and painful romantic relationships shot in a stylized manner. While Erich von Stroheim made a false claim to realism, Sternberg was often apologetic for having too closely approximated reality. By the end of his first decade as a director (far and away his most productive period), Sternberg could certainly be considered the cinema’s greatest Romantic artist, rivaled only later by Max Ophuls.

Congratulations to the teens from the MoMA Teen Voices Project for their hard work on the website PopArt, which recently won a People’s Voice Webby in the Art category. The Teen Voices Project (formerly the Youth Advisory Council), a group of sixteen students from New York City high schools, collaborated with MoMA Staff to design the interactive site.

Faced with the challenge of creating an educational resource that other teens could use to engage with MoMA, the team started by learning about and analyzing existing interactive educational activities, websites, and technology-based communication projects. After countless debates on the purpose of education, the coolest parts of MoMA, and strategies to make MoMA more accessible to teens, the team identified a vision for their project: to create an online tool for people of all ages to interact with and respond to modern art, to reveal unexpected connections between works of art, and to trust in their own “gut” feelings about art.