MoMA's 2024 Collection Series
Jan 05, 2024 to Oct 04, 2024
Official Site
The Museum of Modern Art announces an exhibition series for 2024, focused on modern and contemporary art in all mediums, that can only be seen at MoMA. With new galleries opening each month, these exhibitions will invite audiences to continue to explore MoMA’s dynamic collection and connect with art and ideas from more geographies and perspectives than ever before. A selection of these presentations are highlighted below and will be joined by a monthly slate of additional unique exhibitions, also drawn from the collection.
Body Constructs
Gallery 417
Opening January 5
Modern architects and designers imagined not only new buildings and objects, but also the bodies that would inhabit and use them. Covering the period between roughly 1945 and 1975, this gallery includes works by Henry Dreyfuss, VALIE EXPORT, Michael Webb, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others—many of them on view at MoMA for the first time. They explore modernism’s frictions with question of gender, race, and disability that continue to be prevalent in architectural practice to this day. Works that relied on ergonomics to reduce the human body to a series of universally applicable “average” figures for standardized designs will be juxtaposed with countercultural experiments that treated the body as a site of perpetual reconfiguration. Body Constructs is organized by Evangelos Kotsioris, Assistant Curator, and Paula Vilaplana, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design.
In the Shadow of the American Dream
Gallery 202
Opening March 1
In 1980s New York, artists produced work from the frontlines of an embattled landscape marked by urban desolation, financial precarity, and medical hardship. As the AIDS epidemic ravaged their community, artists harnessed the energy of the city to resist the disenfranchisement they were encountering. Regarding his paintings of shuttered shopfronts on the city's Lower East Side, the artist Martin Wong wrote, “I wanted to focus in close on some of the endless layers of conflict and confinement that have us all bound together in this life without possibility of parole.” Wong’s Houston Street (1986) will be on view for the first time at MoMA, alongside other recently acquired works by Agosto Machado, Donald Moffett, and Marion Scemama. Recalling a moment when many lives were lost and entire neighborhoods were razed, the works in this gallery conjure the eloquent rage of a generation of artists who lived, to quote David Wojnarowicz, “in the shadow of the American dream.” In the Shadow of the American Dream is organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, and Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
A Cubist Salon
Gallery 503
Opening April 5
The term “Cubist”—with rumored origins in artist Henri Matisse’s description of paintings made in 1908 by Georges Braque as “cubes”—has always strained to fit the many different ideas, ambitions, allegiances, and sources of inspiration of the artists associated with this quintessential early-20th-century movement. This densely installed gallery, with paintings of varied dimensions stacked cheek by jowl, nods to the crowded arrangements of artworks often found in artists’ studios and on the walls of private collectors’ homes, as well as to the public display of some of the Cubist painters’ works in the exhibitions known as salons. It aims to picture Cubism as a heterogeneous, unsettled, and dynamic movement in the making, defined by works produced by an international community of artists in the years immediately prior to and during World War I, united in their determination, as poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in The Cubist Painters (1913), to make an art that was “entirely new.” Works by artists traditionally associated with Cubism are presented in dialogue with those by artists aligned with various other early-20th-century avant-garde movements, but who all lived, worked, or passed through Paris at different moments between 1908 and 1918. A Cubist Salon is organized by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
Dance Index
Gallery 409
Opening May 3
This gallery features photographers’ unique responses to the rhythm and lines of midcentury dance, as well as artists’ use of the camera to capture choreography in the world around them. The gallery borrows its title from a journal founded by Lincoln Kirstein—who was also closely associated with MoMA—though here the photograph itself might be seen as a kind of "dance index," the included works move between the dance studio and the “stage” of the street, capturing steps and their sequence in both formal performance and in everyday movement. For Shirley Clarke’s film In Paris Parks (1954) the filmmaker, who herself had trained with Martha Graham, set the natural rhythms of the city’s parks—the card players and joyful children—to music. She later remarked that “you can make dance films without using dancers.” Dance Index is organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, Department of Photography, with Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
Illusions of Life
Gallery 206
Opening June 7
“My belief is that there is a mysteriousness and spirituality in the most banal things. So my interest might be to reveal or make a crack in that mundaneness and show a glimpse of the miraculous,” artist Haegue Yang has said. Anchored by Yang’s Sallim (2009), this gallery looks at the private realm on a public scale, exploring how vulnerability, creativity, and the everyday coincide in the spaces where we live and work. Sallim, which refers to the Korean word for “housekeeping,” conjures a ghostly model of the kitchen in Yang’s Berlin apartment, where she lived and worked. Familiar objects and spaces of routine life become material for intimate explorations of the monumental: questions of time, perspective, and the self. Illusions of Life is organized by Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs. Looking for Langston
Gallery 510
Opening July 5
The Harlem Renaissance, a period between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, was a moment in which intellectuals, activists, and artists experienced unprecedented freedom of expression and opportunities and sought to define what it meant to be Black in a new century. Almost 65 years later, British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien released Looking for Langston (1989), an homage to the poet Langston Hughes that offers a poetic exploration of Black, queer, and artistic identities through the lens of the Harlem Renaissance. With Julien’s groundbreaking film at its center, this gallery presents works of photography and drawing from MoMA’s collection (many on view at the Museum for the first time) to collapse two periods of artistic production and exploration—the Harlem Renaissance and the 1980s—illustrating the important role that artists played in portraying the vibrancy of Black life, as well as the complexities that come with this act. Looking for Langston is organized by Antoinette Roberts, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
Romare Bearden
Gallery 416
Opening August 2
Romare Bearden reinvented his art continually over the course of his six-decade career. Best known for his groundbreaking collage practice of the 1960s and after, he first gained acclaim in the 1940s for both figurative drawings and abstract paintings. Though as a younger man he bristled at the expectation that his work should reflect his race and identity, Bearden ultimately came to embrace the subject of Black American life, and it inspired much of his work. Drawing from MoMA’s rich holdings of Bearden’s work, along with archival material from his retrospective at the Museum in 1971, this gallery will highlight the artist’s multifaceted artistic engagement with postwar America. Romare Bearden is organized by Esther Adler, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, with Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
The Artists of Coenties Slip
Gallery 516
Opening October 4
This gallery will feature a community of artists who lived and worked on one of the oldest streets at the southeastern edge of Manhattan for a brief period in the 1950s and ’60s, including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. Drawn by cheap rents, open floor plans, and solitude, the artists lived and worked in former sailmaking and industrial lofts, and often incorporated objects scavenged from the demolition around them into their art. They never formed a movement; their diverse art encompasses abstraction and figuration, textiles, assemblage, film, and painting—but they all had significant breakthroughs at Coenties Slip that changed the landscape of modern art, and they supported each other’s need to be both a part of and apart from the cultural scene. The Artists of Coenties Slip is organized by Samantha Friedman, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Prudence Peiffer, Director, Content, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
Author: MoMA
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