[title]
The Museum of Modern Art is changing things up again.
MoMA wowed us in 2019 with a major $450 million renovation and reorganization of its galleries and now, it's about to unveil more than 350 newly installed works of art, across 13 galleries in its "Fall Reveal."
Opening to the public on October 31, the new works will feature new voices, new acquisitions, and new perspectives on well-known works that have been in the collection for decades across three collection floors.
RECOMMENDED: The 37 best museums in NYC
Highlights include Motion and Illumination on the fifth floor, Transparency in Architecture and Beyond and Body on the Line on the fourth floor, Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y Fuerza and Sky Hopinka’s I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become on the second floor.
Motion and Illumination show's for the first time in MoMA's history early photography works like the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s film The Flying Train (1902) in order to illustrate how artists in the late 19th century used the new medium to depict new technologies. Some of them, like Edgar Degas, captured blurred landscapes they saw from train windows and sights they saw as they wandered cities, while others took photos of domestic interiors using newly available gas and electric lamps.
One work in particular, Badge of Honor by Pépon Osorio, is a large-scale video installation that features intensely personal narratives from community members about the profound impact of mass incarceratin—it breaks chronology, inserting a contemporary work among the older film reels.
Transparency in Architecture and Beyond features a floor-to-ceiling fragment of the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York, which was one of the first fully transparent pieces of architecture—it was meant to allude that the organization would be unafraid to expose its inner workings, MoMA says. Artists in this gallery explore loss of privacy and voyeurism.
Body on the Line takes visitors on a journey through the struggle for women's rights around the world with art by women spanning from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, while Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y Fuerza puts the artist's exploration of Indigenous myth through his own lens through sculpture made of natural materials and readymade objects with each component selected for its therapeutic, historic, symbolic, and aesthetic properties. Maravilla will lead soundbaths in the gallery, too.
Sky Hopinka’s I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become is a tribute to the Native poet Diane Burns that uses markers of time and place for a vivid meditation on mortality and reincarnation. Footage will show powwow dancers, filmed by Hopinka and partially obscured by folds of shimmering color created through digital editing, with the rhythmic sound of Sacred Harp singing, traditional to the rural American South.
MoMA will also present a weeklong run of Hopinka’s feature debut, maɬni–towards the ocean, towards the shore, from October 28 through November 3, which will also explore Indigenous perspectives on mortality, rebirth, and the afterlife. This presentation marks maɬni’s first theatrical set of screenings in New York City.
"Fall Reveal" is meant to continue MoMA's efforts to share a greater variety of its vast holdings on a seasonally rotating basis, so we're excited to see and hear from a more diverse range of artists this fall.
Online, MoMA will offer up programming to back this up, including a livestreamed talk with Emory Douglas and curators about the museum's installation of newly acquired copies of the Black Panther newspaper (which you can now see on moma.org) on Thursday, October 14, at 7pm. He'll also hold a workshop with emerging artists as part of MoMA’s Art and Practice series, moderated by Professor Colette Gaiter, on Wednesday, November 3.
"Fall Reveal" at MoMA opens on October 30, 2021.