Installation view of Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets at The Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Photo © 2012 Jason Mandella

This summer I served as a curatorial intern assisting curator Ron Magliozzi on the exhibition Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets. My first brush with the Quay brothers, perhaps like most visitors to the Museum’s new retrospective, was entirely tangential.

Attack! 1956. USA. Directed by Robert Aldrich

These notes accompany screenings of Robert Aldrich’s Attack! on November 21 and 23 in Theater 3.

Robert Aldrich (1918–1983) imbibed a certain quantity of leftist nourishment through his pre-directorial associations with Jean Renoir

In the video below, take a tour of multimedia artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s studio. His mixed-media constructions, collages, and installations—marked by a trashy opulence concocted from household items and dollar stores—are the subject of the exhibition Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love Among the Junk, on view at MoMA PS1 through April 1, 2013.

A School Visits film shoot in action

As most museum educators know, capturing what we do is difficult. The insightful comments and “a-ha” moments visitors have during our programs often go unrecorded.

In the video interview above, artist Ali Cherri describes the conceptual approach framing his exhibition Bad, Bad, Images, that opened this past winter in Paris. Pipe Dreams was “extracted” from this exhibition installation, and here the artist explains how he came to transform a two-channel video installation into single-channel video.

In the video interview above, filmmaker Youssef Chebbi shares some of the behind-the-scenes stories around Babylon, the feature-length non-fiction film he co-directed with ismaël [sic] and Ala Eddin Slim.

Portrait of Sean Vegezzi. Photo by Andrew Kass

Sean Vegezzi is a 22-year-old alumnus of our In the Making program, which offers free art classes to NYC teens. Like many students attending public schools here in the city, Sean came to us as a high school student who was seeking an outlet for his creativity as well as a public platform to showcase his work.

Comprising more than 53,000 artworks, the collection of MoMA’s Department of Prints and Illustrated Books tells the story of modern and contemporary art through editions: art objects that can exist in more than one copy. As you might guess from the name of the department, the vast majority of these are works on paper; however, the collection also represents the rich tradition of three-dimensional editions, known as multiples.

MoMA Media Lounge. 2012. Designed by Renée Green. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2012 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Thomas Griesel

Upon arriving as the new Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA about two years ago, I was determined to focus on the acquisition of unique installations and draw a more complete narrative of media and performance art through its representation in videos and photographs in MoMA’s collection and exhibitions.

Pather Panchali. 1955. India. Written and directed by Satyajit Ray

These notes accompany screenings of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali on November 14, 15, and 16 in Theater 2.

“Third World” cinema was pretty much nonexistent for Western audiences until the 1950s. In 1951, with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Japanese films began to appear on a very limited basis.