Asawas C 1955 Untitled S398 at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art
MoMA to Close, Then Open Doors to More Expansive View of Art
Every bit the Museum of Modern Art begins the final stage of its $400 million overhaul, it will close for four months this summer and autumn to reconfigure its galleries, rehang the entire drove and rethink the way that the story of modern and contemporary art is presented to the public.
The Picassos and van Goghs volition yet be at that place, merely the 40,000 square feet of additional space will allow MoMA to focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other overlooked artists similar Shigeru Onishi, a Japanese experimental lensman, or Hervé Télémaque, a Haitian-born painter who is now 81.
With the doors closed from June 15 to October. 21, the museum will give up summertime tourism revenue in the interest of creating a new MoMA that will abandon the subject field-based display system information technology has used for eight decades.
3 floors of exhibition space volition retain a spine of chronology, but the museum will now mix media, juxtaposing painting, sculpture, compages, design, photography, performance, film and works on paper.
"A new generation of curators is discovering the richness of what is in our collection, and there is keen work being made around the earth that nosotros need to pay attending to," said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the museum. "It means that the usual gets supplanted now past the unexpected."
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MoMA is announcing these changes and others on Tuesday. In another marked shift, the museum will rotate a selection of art in its galleries every half dozen to ix months and depict all of the opening exhibitions from its permanent collection — an acknowledgment that at that place is no single or complete history of modern and contemporary art and that many of MoMA's holdings take historically been overlooked.
As a consequence, while visitors will notwithstanding be able to count on highlights similar Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and van Gogh'due south "The Starry Night," they are as well likely to be exposed to less familiar names, including Okwui Okpokwasili, an Igbo-Nigerian-American artist, performer and choreographer.
The renovation — designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler — will include additional space from the demolished American Folk Fine art Museum. Existing galleries will likewise expand west through 53W53, the new residential skyscraper designed past Jean Nouvel.
The museum volition reopen with a survey of Latin American art, along with exhibitions by two African-American artists: Pope.50, known for his provocative performances, and Betye Saar, 92, whose collages and assemblages have ofttimes flown nether the radar.
"We don't desire to forget our roots in terms of having the greatest Modernist collection," Leon Blackness, the museum's chairman, said, "just the museum didn't emphasize female artists, didn't emphasize what minority artists were doing, and it was limited on geography." He added, "Where those were always the exceptions, at present they really should be office of the reality of the multicultural society nosotros all live in."
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MoMA is besides announcing a new partnership that will allow the Studio Museum in Harlem to present exhibitions at MoMA while its own building on 125th Street is nether structure. The first exhibition at the "Studio Museum at MoMA" will feature the Kenyan-born artist Michael Armitage. Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum'due south manager, volition curate. The Armitage exhibition will be presented in MoMA's new Projects Gallery on the expanded ground floor which, forth with the street-level gallery of compages and pattern, volition be free to the public.
Ms. Gilded described the partnership as "a new epitome for collaboration that looks at the different means institutions can come together," adding that it was meaningful to follow in the footsteps of the former MoMA curator, Kynaston McShine. Mr. McShine, who died last year, started MoMA'southward Projects serial in the 1970s and "fabricated it possible for me to see myself every bit a curator," Ms. Golden said, "to understand my possibilities."
Mr. Lowry said the collaboration likewise allows MoMA "to aggrandize our knowledge about a range of artists we may only exist vaguely familiar with."
During its last renovation in 2004, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, MoMA moved to temporary space in Queens for two years. Because the museum volition be closed for a shorter period this time, Mr. Lowry said relocation would be unnecessary.
Asked most the financial toll of the hiatus, he said the museum had approaching to prepare for lost revenue (MoMA PS 1 volition remain open). In the terminal few years MoMA has received what Mr. Lowry once called "the kind of gifts you merely dream well-nigh," namely $100 million from the entertainment mogul David Geffen. On Tuesday, MoMA will announce nevertheless another: more than $200 1000000 from the estate of David Rockefeller, the philanthropist and banker, who died in 2017.
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The bear on on tourism of a summer without MoMA remains to exist seen. Fred Dixon, NYC & Company's president and master executive, said, "Because so much volition exist on offer this yr, we don't anticipate seeing any negative tourism touch on."
In the new MoMA, some private galleries will still exist medium-specific — merely visitors will find several possible routes through the expanded museum.
They will also find a new two-story Studio for alive and experimental programming, including functioning, dance, music, moving paradigm and audio works. Some other new infinite, the second-flooring Platform, will be a place for visitors to brand fine art and join conversations. "We're trying to make a visit to the museum a comfortable, enjoyable experience that lets you move back and along from looking at art to talking about art to thinking about art," Mr. Lowry said.
The new museum will open earlier, at 10 a.grand.; extend its hours to 9 p.k. on the first Thursday of every month; and include a reconfigured Museum shop . Member benefits will include a new dedicated entrance and coat check and nine:30 a.thou. entry. A redesigned lobby aims to meliorate circulation, and new lounges to signal welcome.
The new regular rotation of fine art ways that xxx percent of the galleries volition have inverse in one year and the entire gallery space volition take been re-choreographed by 2022.
"At whatever given moment," Mr. Lowry said, "there will be something new to see."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/arts/design/moma-museum-renovation.html