Episode Five: “Walk the Painting”

With the Museum finally closed, it’s all hands on deck to get everything ready for the October reopening. Art handlers, designers, conservators, and curators take over the galleries to begin the transformation. Works are cleaned, disassembled, and relocated, while new areas of the Museum receive their first installations.

Table of Contents

1:07 - Art handler Bo Berkman confers with conservator Anny Aviram about dusting the paintings as they move from gallery to gallery.

2:43 - Art handlers remove the last of the ultrasound gel and rusty pins from Anicka Yi’s Shameplex.

3:12 - Conservator Megan Randall disassembles Tauba Auerbach’s Altar/Engine.

4:43 - Signage goes up to announce the new MoMA.

5:06 - Artists Phil Edelstein and John Driscoll lead the installation of David Tudor’s Rainforest V (variation 1), the inaugural work to be seen in the Kravis Studio, a new space dedicated to media and performance.

6:01 - Curator Ana Janevski introduces photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon, in the building for a project photographing MoMA staff, to Edelstein.

7:07 - Creative director Ingrid Chou and the design team debate way-finding sign locations.

7:33 - Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night comes down from the wall. Art handlers escort it to the conservation department for cleaning.

9:14 - Anny Aviram recalls the last time the Museum lent Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to another museum.

The eight-episode video series At the Museum offers a behind-the-scenes, cross-departmental view of MoMA’s staff preparing for the Museum’s reopening in October. Watch all of the previous episodes from season two.