Wangechi Mutu. One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. 2004

The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times, a new exhibition organized by my colleagues Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Luis Pérez-Oramas, opened in the Drawings Galleries last week, bringing together a stunning display of works from MoMA’s collection that draw on the motif of mythology. One eye-catching work in the contemporary section of the exhibition is a large-scale collage by Wangechi Mutu titled One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. She made this work in 2004 during her artist-in-residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and it was acquired by MoMA directly from her soon after our curators saw it on view in the Studio Museum’s exhibition Figuratively.

Though she has also worked in video, sculpture, installation, and, most recently, performance (as part of Performa in 2009), for the past several years Mutu has produced stunning collages of fantastically ornate hybrid women, composed of cut-out images culled from magazines ranging from Vogue to National Geographic, outdated ethnographic surveys, pornography, and botanical illustrations. Mutu is interested in how stereotypes become ingrained into the public conscious, and through her art she investigates gender and racial stereotypes, in particular those pertaining to black women, formulating a distinctly personal position on feminism, postcolonial continental Africa, and globalization.

…your Bill Cunningham–inspired photo could win you a series pass to New Directors/New Films!

Bill Cunningham New York. 2010. USA. Directed by Richard Press. Image courtesy The New York Times and First Thought Films

Legendary New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham—now entering his ninth decade and still riding his Schwinn around Manhattan, snapping pictures of the people and events that captivate our city—stands out in a city of dedicated originals. He’s also the subject of the opening night film of New Directors/New Films 2010, jointly presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA. Now MoMA and FLSC want to give one lucky reader a chance to discover fresh work by emerging filmmakers with a series pass to the festival!

Here’s how it works: You take a picture of your fellow New Yorkers, inspired by Cunningham’s off-the-cuff, street-level style. (Think colorful, spontaneous—cell phone pics welcome!) We’ll pick one at random, and award the lucky photographer a series pass*, plus two tickets to see Bill Cunningham, New York at FLSC on Thursday, March 25.

Photograph by Michael Nagle

In September, one of the participants of Create Ability, MoMA’s monthly program for individuals with learning or developmental disabilities and their families, asked me, “Why don’t we have our own exhibition?” We were returning to the classroom to create our own art after a gallery tour wherein we’d discussed The Moroccans by Henri Matisse, Harlequin by Pablo Picasso, and the neon-colored sculptures by Franz West outside in the Sculpture Garden. I immediately began gathering artwork created each subsequent month, and on Thursday, March 4, the opening reception for the first exhibition of work produced by Create Ability participants was held.

We started the installation of the teams’ wall materials and models in the gallery yesterday, with ARO’s team beginning the assembly of their model. We liked the correlation of the unpacking of “Lower Manhattan” from the Manhattan Mini-Storage boxes! Each of the five teams are coming to do on-site installations this week. We’re looking forward to the public opening of the Rising Currents exhibition on March 24.

The General. 1926. USA. Directed by Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman

These notes accompany the Buster’s Best program, which screens on March 17, 18, and 19 in Theater 3.

The career of Buster Keaton (1895–1966) is both one of the cinema’s glories and one of its greatest tragedies. If one measures auteurism by a director’s ability to visualize an alternative personal universe on film, then Keaton ranks near the top. Buster’s vision of a world where machinery and Nature perpetually challenge human ingenuity and survival is made credible by his uniquely precise mastery of both the mechanics of his art form and the musculature of his own body—and his establishment of a link between the two. In a sense, he was a bionic man a half-century before Lee Majors.

“We want to live-stream a silent woman, sitting still in a chair all day for three months.”—Paraphrased from a meeting a few weeks ago, followed by the sound of my hand hitting my forehead.

Screenshot from performance by Marina Abramović, MoMA, March 9, 2010

Working in a department that interfaces with the Internet (home of zany fun like Is This Art? and my new favorite site Selleck Waterfall Sandwich), you get used to hearing a lot of unusual ideas getting presented as Things We Need To Be Doing Right Away. I guess I should be used to it by now, since MoMA is a museum that has in its collection an alleged can of poop.

The author (center, in black shirt) with the Walker's first Teen Arts Council, 1996

Yesterday afternoon I was teaching printmaking to students at a nonsecure educational facility run by the Juvenile Justice Department, when one of the teens showed me what he was working on and said, “My work looks good, man. You should put it up in your museum.”

He meant it jokingly, the sort of statement teens make when they’re proud of themselves and overcome with a bit of adolescent bravado. But behind all of that was a clear yearning to be seen, for his hard work to be recognized. Today, his group visited the Museum for a guided tour, and I was able to hand them information on MoMA’s teen programs. I told them that if they wanted their art to hang here, a first step to take is signing up for one of our free classes. These students are being educated at their facility because, for whatever reason, mainstream education isn’t working for them. But I have utter faith that, high school dropout or honor roll student, rich or poor, attending teen programs at a museum will irrevocably alter their lives for the better. That isn’t hyperbole. It’s personal history.

Do You Know Your MoMA? Can you identify these six works in 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.

Keep in mind that we’re starting with some easy selections, but they’ll get harder as we go along!

On one of my recent early-morning checks of the fifth-floor collection galleries—a daily duty of the curatorial staff, to spot any oddities—an elusive, visceral feeling gave me pause. It took me a moment to recognize that it was prompted by the wall color, which, as I moved from the European Expressionist gallery to the adjacent Matisse room, had changed from a light grey to what appeared to be a bright white. This color change is subtle enough to likely go unnoticed by many visitors, but deserves a brief moment of attention.

View of Cézanne to Picasso: Paintings from the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection, July 17, 2009–August 31, 2009. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: John Wronn

Corpse Bride. 2005. USA/Great Britain. Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

This year’s Academy Awards telecast paid tribute to horror films—a genre cited by the presenters as often neglected by the Academy—with a clip reel that featured select masterworks of cinema by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Roman Polanski. As I watched the montage, I caught glimpses from Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Sleepy Hollow (1999). Although I found their inclusion to be a bit incongruous among films like The Exorcist, Carrie, Friday the 13^th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, The Ring, and The Blair Witch Project, it nevertheless reaffirmed the popular perception of Tim Burton as a dark, gothic, and macabre filmmaker. Certainly, with Tim’s affinity for skeletons, graveyards, severed heads, and iron maidens—some of the recurrent motifs in his work—the classification of his films into the horror genre would surprise few. However, I propose another genre to be considered when examining Tim’s oeuvre: the musical film.