MoMA | Tag: #MoMACollects

Posts tagged ‘#MoMACollects’

June 15, 2016 | Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: New Photography 2015, Part 2

Posted by Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography

DIS. Positive Ambiguity (beard, lectern, teleprompter, wind machine, confidence). 2015. Installation view, Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, The Museum of Modern Art, November 7, 2015–March 20, 2016. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Thomas Griesel

In January I wrote about five artists who had come into MoMA’s collection through Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, the most recent iteration of the New Photography series, which has a long history of bringing new works by young artists into the Museum.

June 1, 2016 | Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: David Tudor’s Rainforest V (Variation 1)

Posted by Martha Joseph, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art

David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics. Rainforest V (Variation 1). 1973–2015. Sound installation of 20 objects, dimensions variable. Installation view, Broadway 1602. Courtesy Broadway 1602, New York

“My piece Rainforest IV was developed from ideas I had as early as 1965…. An offer came, which didn’t get realized…I was asked to make a proposal for a park in Washington. The idea was to have a sounding outdoor sculpture, so my mind began turning around. I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful if each sculpture sounded completely different from the other and the whole could be run by one machine . . . .'” – David Tudor

April 19, 2016 | Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: Architecture on Film

Posted by Paul Galloway, Collection Specialist, Department of Architecture and Design

Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine. Koolhaas Houselife. 2008. Video (color, sound), 58 min. Gift of Andrea Woodner. © 2016 Bêka & Lemoine

We are proud to announce the acquisition of Living Architectures, a suite of films by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine. These films imaginatively (and often hilariously) explore the daily life of contemporary architecture as it is inhabited and experienced. This acquisition represents the first inroads for the Department of Architecture and Design into the medium of film.

March 31, 2016 | Collection & Exhibitions, Film

MoMA Collects: Jeff Scher’s Pretty, Dead

Posted by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film

Pretty, Dead. 2010. USA. Directed by Jeff Scher. Digital cinema. Purchase from the artist

In Pretty, Dead, Jeff Scher plays with all the stuff film noir dreams are made of: the hardboiled private eye and the femme fatale; the revolver, the slouched hat, the alley brawl, and the twisted corpse; sweat, paranoia, fatalism, destiny. All this is to be found among the nearly 4,000 collages and paintings in watercolor and gouache that compose the work.

February 25, 2016 | Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: NASA Photographs of the Apollo Missions

Posted by Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography

Left: Untitled photograph from the Apollo 11 mission. July 1969. Chromogenic color print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill; right: Untitled photograph from the Apollo 11 mission. July 1969. Chromogenic color print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill

The Apollo space program, which conducted 12 manned missions between 1961 and 1975, was the first to bring humans to the moon, and has become a cultural touchstone. The most famous mission, of course, is Apollo 11, when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first humans to walk on the surface of the moon.

February 12, 2016 | Behind the Scenes, Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: Andres Serrano’s Piss and Blood

Posted by Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography

Andres Serrano. Piss. 1987. Chromogenic color print, 40 × 60" (101.6 × 152.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. The Abramson Collection. Gift of Stephen and Sandra Abramson. © 2016 Andres Serrano

For a number of years MoMA’s Department of Photography has sought to collect works by the American photographer Andres Serrano (b. 1950), and an exciting acquisition finally came to fruition through the generosity of Stephen and Sandra Abramson, who gifted to the Museum two Serrano works, Piss (1987) and Blood (1987).

January 29, 2016 | Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: Rafael Barradas, Kim Beom, William Johnson, Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, and Others

Posted by Nancy Lim, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture

In mid-January, two of MoMA’s six curatorial departments—Painting and Sculpture, and Drawings and Prints—held acquisitions meetings to usher into the Museum’s collection new artist’s books, posters, fabric installations, painted sculptures, and more. These meetings take place quarterly and, over the course of the year, result in the addition of hundreds of works—spanning mediums, geographies, and histories—to create an overall collection that is continuously evolving.

January 27, 2016 | Artists, Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions

Posted by Nancy Lim, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture

Before moving to New York in 1959, choreographer Simone Forti spent four heady, formative years in San Francisco. There, she trained with the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who rejected the stylistic constraints of ballet and modern dance. On Halprin’s outdoor dance deck in wooded Marin County, Forti explored improvisation, her motions guided by a keen alertness to the body’s anatomy. She also organized open-work sessions with her then husband, the Minimalist artist Robert Morris, gathering artists for communal, multidisciplinary explorations of movement, objects, sound, and light.

January 8, 2016 | Collection & Exhibitions

New Photography and MoMA’s Collection, Part 1

Posted by Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont & Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography

The New Photography exhibition series—which Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, has called “a window on the Museum’s approach to photography”—has been an influential vehicle for acquisitions for three decades.

December 19, 2015 | Behind the Scenes, Collection & Exhibitions

MoMA Collects: Introducing New Acquisitions

Posted by Nancy Lim, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture

Basim Magdy. Stills from A 240 Second Analysis of Failure and Hopefulness (With Coke, Vinegar and Other Tear Gas Remedies). 2012. 160 35mm color slides and two synchronized Kodak slide carousel projectors, 4 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2015 Basim Magdy

From an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing in 1929, MoMA’s collection has bloomed to nearly 200,000 works across six curatorial departments—Painting and Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, Media and Performance Art, Photography, Film, and Architecture and Design—including everything from Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) to Maya Deren’s lush film Meshes of the Afternoon