Three-dimensional rendering of the entrance to Tim Burton (left) by TwoSeven, Inc., based on an untitled drawing (right) by Tim Burton for the unrealized project Trick or Treat (1980)

Tim Burton was one of the most challenging exhibitions our graphic design department has had the pleasure of fully developing. It explores a wide spectrum of Tim Burton’s creative work, including drawings, paintings, photographs, moving images, concept art, storyboards, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera. For the exhibition graphic design, our goal was to take all these diverse visual references and distill them into a simple graphic treatment that celebrated Burton’s work.

How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in the galleries. If you think you can identify the artist, title, and location 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:

Flickr page for images from Denver, CO

One of the great things about working in museums is the amount of information exchange there is with our fellow colleagues at other cultural institutions. While we all want our museum to be the best it can be (whether its an arts institution, history or social history museum, science museum, or other), there is also a real interest in sharing our experiences and learning from each other. Some of this dialogue takes place informally, one on one; other times it takes place at conferences. There are several museum-focused conferences, including AAM (the American Association of Museums), which is perhaps the largest; MCN (Museum Computer Network); and Museums and the Web. I am currently attending the Museums and the Web conference that is taking place this week in Denver, Colorado, along with Beth Harris and Lisa Mazzola, my colleagues in the Education Department.

I first made a studio visit with Sanja Iveković about ten years ago, when I was invited to organize a large-scale exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia. She impressed me instantly. I recall thinking, “This is an inspiring artist with whom I will forge a long-lasting relationship.” A feminist, activist, and video pioneer, Iveković came of age in the early 1970s, when artists broke free from mainstream institutional settings, laying the ground for a form of praxis antipodal to official art. Part of the generation known as the Nova Umjetnička Praksa (New Art Practice), she has produced works of cross-cultural resonance that range from conceptual photomontages to video and performance. Last month I visited Iveković again in Zagreb, this time to discuss her first survey exhibition in the U.S., which is scheduled to open at MoMA at the end of 2011.

Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889

In this column I have often discussed the efforts made by the Department of Painting and Sculpture to circulate works in our collection galleries as frequently as we can manage, thereby showing the broadest possible range of our extensive holdings. All of our works are historically significant in their own way; still, we do recognize that there are dedicated audiences for certain landmark acquisitions made by the Museum, and so there are a few works that remain on view indefinitely. Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso, The Starry Night (1889) by Vincent van Gogh, and Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) certainly all fall into this category.

This past August, I visited Marina Abramović at her home in upstate New York, where she was running a workshop with the re-performers of the exhibition Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. In a series of five videos that show excerpts of my conversation with the artist, she talks about her work, her exhibition at MoMA, and performance art. As an artist who uses her body as a medium, it is fascinating to hear Abramović’s feelings on fear and limitations. In this video, the artist offers her thoughts on the meaning and definition of performance art.

Entr’acte. 1924. France. Directed by René Clair

These notes accompany the French Avant-Garde of the 1920s program, screening April 14, 15, and 16 in Theater 3.

Charles Sheeler comes to mind as one of the few American artists who dabbled in film in the 1920s. Whereas in Germany the mainstream Expressionist cinema was itself avant-garde, and in Italy the society became surreal following Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922, France presented a unique instance of a free interplay of filmmakers with other visual artists. This program is an attempt to capture some of this interaction and to suggest how it might have benefited French culture. It also suggests that a society where the movies were totally dominated neither by commerce nor by the state provided an appealing model. It was certainly beneficial to Iris Barry, the founder of The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, to be able to cite names like Man Ray, Duchamp, Léger, and Dalí in establishing the high aspirations and legitimacy of film when appealing for funds from patrons who might look askance at Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, or Walt Disney. (It was left for us future generations to make cogent arguments for Otto Preminger, Clint Eastwood, and John Waters.)

A seven- or eight-year-old boy sits at a table and carefully sifts through a pile of brightly-colored laminated shapes. I have posed a challenge: can you show a person running? At first, he is stumped. He picks up some pieces but then declares, “I can’t.” So I pose for him. I bend my arms and legs and ask him to look at the shapes they are making, and then ask him to see if he can find or even combine some shapes to show that movement. I leave him for a few minutes and then return. He proclaims, “I did it!” and indeed he did. Using shapes such as simple rectangles and squares, and the more complex “L” and rectangular “U”s, he has created an abstracted figure of a man running. Later I ask if he can document his creation with a drawing, which he does.

Such is a typical experience as a facilitator for Shape Lab, our latest interactive space at MoMA.

How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in the galleries. If you think you can identify the artist, title, and location 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:

Another dive into our archives reveals a popular graphic design technique we tend to forget about today: serials! Below are a few examples of printing processes determining design, as colors are switched out to create families of posters, brochures, and invitations.