The author poses with Michael Heizer’s sculpture Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: Emily Lytle-Painter
How many times have we overheard visitors looking at Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel or an Abstract Expressionist work for the first time wonder aloud, “But why is this art? How did this make it into a museum?” (And, let’s be honest, how many times have we seen a new piece and silently asked ourselves the exact same thing?)
Images of Paris, 2014. Photos: Dimitra Nikoloù
Art collections are the face of museums; how a permanent collection is presented speaks to the vision of the museum in the most elementary way. My interest in museum collections and how they are displayed took me to Paris, a city I love, where I was able to explore this confluence of display and institutional vision.
East Side Gallery/Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, May 26, 2014. Photo: Cindy Yeh
Berlin, the Mecca of performance art, a site of reconciliation and growth, and a community of refugees finding their safe space nestled between street art and reclaimed historical spaces. Continuing my work of performance art documentation, I traveled to Berlin to explore current trends in the medium. During the month of May, many performances take place around the world, but MPA-Berlin really caught my eye because of the intensity of its programming for the month.
In Italian, un confronto; in English, a comparison, contrast, or confrontation. In New York, old buildings, like Dia:Beacon, are sometimes beautifully repurposed as museums, but more often they are torn down for something new. In Italy, factories and castles are often transformed into modern and contemporary art institutions. The past confronts the present, and the present is enhanced through its relationship to history.
This May, I had the opportunity to travel to Marfa, Texas, using a generous travel stipend that is one of the fantastic perks of my internship. I’d always wanted to go to Marfa, a small town in West Texas that’s home to site-specific installations by Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Ilya Kabakov, Dan Flavin, and Roni Horn, among others.
First stop, the birth place of innovation as we know it, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; on right: Origins of the V&A. Print showing foreign departments in the Great Exhibition, 1851. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
R&D, or research and development, is commonly associated with innovation. Museums, traditionally, are not. Museums are associated with history. Even when displaying contemporary art, they look back into a recent history, not the future. Innovation demands looking into the future, conducting research into the unknown, without a concrete, expected outcome. A leap of faith.
After a long and cold winter in New York, I found myself waiting outside the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco on a warm and sunny day. As I was waiting for my appointment with the museum’s Education and Access Manager, I was already comparing San Francisco with New York, and my hometown of Istanbul, in terms of accessibility and whether museums in these cities are relevant to people with disabilities.
The entrance to Newsueum, Washington, DC. Image courtesy Newseum
One of the many Contexts vitrines in Once Upon a Time…the Collection Now at the Van Abbemuseum
What kind of stories do a museum’s archives tell when read in tandem with masterpieces in their permanent collections? After allowing me to explore innovative exhibition strategies for archival material last summer, this year, MoMA’s intern travel grant gave me the opportunity to visit a Dutch museum that is contending with that exact question.
Installation view of the Arkheia exhibition Visita al Archivo Olivier Debroise: entre la ficción y el documento, 2011. Courtesy of Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC, UNAM. Furniture design by Giacomo Castagnola
Working with the fascinating collections in the MoMA Archives on a daily basis has led me to think about the ways in which archives share their unpublished material with the public.
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