View of the concert performed by Robert Moog and the Moog Synthesizer, part of the Jazz in the Garden series, The Museum of Modern Art, August 28, 1969. Photographer: Peter Moore. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

The exhibition Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye explores the ways in which sound technologies have shaped the way we listen to musical culture. Highlighting both technical innovation and design aesthetics, the exhibition includes a number of modern instruments, including a Yamaha Portatone Keyboard and a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar.

With an extra hour of daylight to enjoy, this week visitors of all ages have more to experience in the galleries and in our theaters:

Since 2012, Quest to Learn (Q2L) students have come to MoMA during their school’s Boss Level—a weeklong period where students work in small teams on a particular challenge that culminates in a showcase. This year, students explored MoMA’s collection and exhibitions and made art in response to their research and experience.

I’ve recently discovered a sassy feature that has been in the MoMA collection for more than 40 years. Don’t Bet on Women, a drawing-room comedy produced by the Fox Film Corp. in 1931, encompasses all of the risqué behaviors, modes of dress, suggestive situations, and freewheeling alcohol consumption that the Motion Picture Production Code hoped to curtail.

What do Susan Kare’s graphic designs for user interface icons, The Living’s mycelium bricks, and Formafantasma’s speculative Botanica series of vessels have in common? Apart from each being compelling contemporary design experiments in their own right, they’re also part of the newest crop of acquisitions welcomed into The Museum of Modern Art’s collection, and all are now on public display in the recently opened exhibition This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.

Leading up to her new class After-Hours: Making Music Modern, instructor Marianne Eggler sits down with MoMA’s Susannah Brown to share her excitement for this unique new program.

Our spring season kicks off this week with big names and (literally) big works of art, and we can’t wait. Here’s what’s in store:

When you visit a modern art museum it can be easy to find yourself looking at a blank white canvas or a pile of bricks and wonder, “How is this art? Shouldn’t art be about something?” The problem of appreciating art is not limited to casual viewers. As an artist and employee at MoMA, I too can find it tough to relate to certain artworks. But the good news is that we can do more than just throw up our hands and ask for our money back. With a bit of imagination, we can make up our own ideas about an artwork and those stories may end up having more meaning to us than any art historical analysis.

“Sterling silver models of tanks, jeeps, trucks, etc.” being installed for the exhibition Norman Bel Geddes’ War Maneuver Models, January 26–March 5, 1944. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photographer: Herbert Gehr

As Archives Specialist in the MoMA Archives, I am always on the prowl for images depicting how our exhibitions were installed. Sadly, up until the 1960s only about 75% of MoMA’s exhibitions were documented with official installation photographs, usually due to budget constraints. So imagine my excitement on one dark, drab winter day earlier this year when, while working in the Photographic Archive, I came across a folder labeled, “Visitors in Galleries,” and discovered that these visitors were in galleries for an exhibition for which we had no visual record

The Beatles’ Revolver, with Klaus Voorman’s haunting illustration and photo-collage work, was the first LP cover added to the design collection in my time at MoMA and I was thrilled to see it arrive. Recently Help!, Rubber Soul, and Sgt Peppers’ Lonely Heart’s Club Band LP covers were acquired and all are currently on view in Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye along with The Beatles, aka the White Album, from MoMA’s drawings and prints collection. Exhibited together, these Beatles album covers offer a design-based narrative of the band’s evolution, and at same time read as a cultural narrative of the times.