BGuthrie Photos: NY -- NYC -- Museum of Modern Art -- 2nd Floor (Collection 1970s-Present)

NY -- NYC -- Museum of Modern Art -- 2nd Floor (Collection 1970s-Present):

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Description of Pictures: Collection 1970s–Present
Floor 2
Arranged in loosely chronological order, each of the 16 galleries on this floor explores an individual topic. A gallery may be devoted to an artist, a specific medium or discipline, a particular place in a moment in time, or a shared creative idea. These presentations are conceived by teams of curators from all fields and at all levels of seniority collaborating closely to share expertise and viewpoints. An ongoing program of frequent reinstallation will feature a wide range of artworks in new combinations—a reminder that countless ideas and histories can be explored through the Museum’s rich collection.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] MOMA2_191221_001.JPG	[2] MOMA2_191221_003.JPG	[3] MOMA2_191221_007.JPG
[4] MOMA2_191221_010.JPG	[5] MOMA2_191221_012.JPG	[6] MOMA2_191221_016.JPG
[7] MOMA2_191221_020.JPG	[8] MOMA2_191221_022.JPG	[9] MOMA2_191221_024.JPG
[10] MOMA2_191221_026.JPG	[11] MOMA2_191221_031.JPG	[12] MOMA2_191221_033.JPG
[13] MOMA2_191221_038.JPG	[14] MOMA2_191221_041.JPG	[15] MOMA2_191221_044.JPG
[16] MOMA2_191221_047.JPG	[17] MOMA2_191221_050.JPG	[18] MOMA2_191221_052.JPG
[19] MOMA2_191221_059.JPG	[20] MOMA2_191221_060.JPG	[21] MOMA2_191221_062.JPG
[22] MOMA2_191221_067.JPG	[23] MOMA2_191221_069.JPG	[24] MOMA2_191221_072.JPG
[25] MOMA2_191221_073.JPG	[26] MOMA2_191221_075.JPG	[27] MOMA2_191221_078.JPG
[28] MOMA2_191221_080.JPG	[29] MOMA2_191221_084.JPG	[30] MOMA2_191221_087.JPG
[31] MOMA2_191221_088.JPG	[32] MOMA2_191221_090.JPG	[33] MOMA2_191221_091.JPG
[34] MOMA2_191221_101.JPG	[35] MOMA2_191221_102.JPG	[36] MOMA2_191221_104.JPG
[37] MOMA2_191221_106.JPG	[38] MOMA2_191221_108.JPG	[39] MOMA2_191221_110.JPG
[40] MOMA2_191221_113.JPG	[41] MOMA2_191221_118.JPG	[42] MOMA2_191221_119.JPG
[43] MOMA2_191221_122.JPG	[44] MOMA2_191221_125.JPG	[45] MOMA2_191221_128.JPG
[46] MOMA2_191221_139.JPG	[47] MOMA2_191221_144.JPG	[48] MOMA2_191221_145.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. MOMA2_191221_001.JPG: Collection 1970s-Present Arranged in loosely chronological order, each of the 16 galleries on this floor explores an individual topic. A gallery may be devoted to an artist, a specific medium or discipline, a particular place in a moment in time, or a shared creative idea. These presentations are conceived by teams of curators from all fields and at all levels of seniority collaborating closely to share expertise and viewpoints. An ongoing program of frequent reinstallation will feature a wide range of artworks in new combinations -- a reminder that countless ideas and histories can be explored through the Museum's rich collection.
2. MOMA2_191221_003.JPG: Jenny Holzer, Lady Pink Trust visions that don't feature buckets of blood, 1983-84 In the 1980s, Holzer and Lady Pink used New York as a backdrop for their artworks: Holzer wheatpasted posters and slogans on walls throughout Manhattan, and Lady Pink spray-painted graffiti on buildings and subway cars. The two also collaborated on a series of paintings on canvas, such as this work, for which Holzer composed phrases and Lady Pink did the painting. Trust visions that don't feature buckets of blood was based on a recent image by the documentary photographer Susan Meiselas, who worked extensively in Nicaragua during the armed conflict that roiled the nation for decades in the second half of the twentieth century.
3. MOMA2_191221_007.JPG: Jeff Koons Pink Panther, 1988 Pink Panther depicts a 1950s pin–up, modeled on the American B–movie actress Jayne Mansfield, with one hand covering a breast bared by a garment that has slipped down -- a predicament for which Mansfield was notorious. The stuffed Pink Panther she clutches with her other hand is cheekily extending his tail toward the waistband of her skirt. Pink Panther is part of Koons's Banality series, a group of twenty sculptures that draws on both popular culture and mass–market knickknacks. Koons enlarged, combined, and transformed his sources, and had his designs fabricated by European artisans in ceramic and polychromed wood. Sonnabend financed the production of the Banality series over a two–year period, seeing the sculptures for the first time when they were uncrated for exhibition at her New York gallery in 1988.
4. MOMA2_191221_010.JPG: Jeff Koons Pink Panther, 1988
5. MOMA2_191221_012.JPG: Martin Wong Stanton near Forsyth Street, 1983 In 1978 Wong moved to New York, where he began to paint the neighborhoods of downtown Manhattan. Stanton near Forsyth Street is one of his signature Lower East Side cityscapes, in which brown-brick tenement buildings rise amid abandoned lots, refuse, and graffiti-covered surfaces. Two small figures appear in the foreground: on the left is a self-portrait of the artist, and on the right is Miguel Pi�ero, the Nuyorican poet and playwright who was Wong's frequent collaborator and romantic partner. The artist's stylized fingerspellings, a recurring visual idiom in his work that is appropriated from American Sign Language, scroll across the upper part of the painting.
6. MOMA2_191221_016.JPG: Keith Haring Untitled, 1982 Haring began his career in the early 1980s with graffiti drawings made in the subways and on the sidewalks of New York City. Cartoonish creatures were combined with highly stylized abstract patterning to create a dense, rhythmic carpet of imagery, and spaceships, hearts, crawling babies, and winged figures appeared frequently, as they do in this large, friezelike drawing. Its size evokes the artist's ephemeral public murals and bridges the gap between the art gallery and the street.
7. MOMA2_191221_020.JPG: Keith Haring Untitled, 1982
8. MOMA2_191221_022.JPG: Keith Haring Untitled, 1982
9. MOMA2_191221_024.JPG: Jeff Koons Pink Panther, 1988
10. MOMA2_191221_026.JPG: Maren Hassinger Leaning, 1980 Emerging from Hassinger's training in fiber arts and longstanding interest in dance, Leaning captures movement in sculptural form, falling somewhere between object-making and performance. "I… began to use the cable in a fiberlike manner," she recalled. "I bunched it and bound it with wire, then unplied all the strands. I noticed that the material began to resemble living, moving, growing things." The thirty-two bundles that compose the work give the impression of movement, from the smallest details -- the unraveling of the steel rope at the tops and bottoms of each bale -- to the way the entire installation seems to sway and bend, as though moved by wind.
11. MOMA2_191221_031.JPG: Senga Nengudi R.S.V.P. I, 1977/2003 Nengudi's R.S.V.P. I is a sculptural environment composed entirely of two ordinary materials: pantyhose and sand. The pantyhose -- ten worn pairs -- are tacked onto and stretched between two walls in the corner of a room: the taut nylon mesh evokes spidery limbs, while the center gusset, filled with sand, is twisted and knotted into bulging sacks that sag toward the ground. R.S.V.P. I highlights the formal concerns of abstract sculpture, such as weight, tension, and spatial relations, yet is undeniably redolent of fleshy associations, particularly those of the female body. Referring to her works as "abstracted reflections of used bodies," Nengudi created R.S.V.P. I in part as a response to the changes her body had undergone during pregnancy and as a rumination on the more gradual physical transformations that come with age. R.S.V.P. I was included in Nengudi's eponymous exhibition at New York's Just Above Midtown Gallery in 1977, a commercial enterprise on Fifty-Seventh Street that had opened three years earlier with the mission of representing African American artists. As implied by the title -- the commonly used French acronym for "please respond" -- the objects on view were meant to be interacted with, not merely observed passively. Indeed, Nengudi and artist Maren Hassinger, her frequent collaborator, staged performances during the run of the show in which they probed and manipulated the sculptures.
12. MOMA2_191221_033.JPG: Joan Semmel Night Light, 1978 This work derives from Semmel's experience of looking through a camera lens at her own dramatically cropped and foreshortened figure. "When you look at yourself, you're not looking at the whole body, you see it in fragments," she explained. "I was interested in how you experience the body rather than an image of an ideal." The work challenges the tradition of the female nude by capturing the gaze of a female maker.
13. MOMA2_191221_038.JPG: Senga Nengudi R.S.V.P. I, 1977/2003
14. MOMA2_191221_050.JPG: Robert Gober Untitled Leg, 1989-90 As a copy of a man's leg and foot, this work is strikingly real: its fleshy waxen skin, clad in leather shoe and in cotton pant and sock, sprouts actual human hair. Exactness like this slides over into the unsettling, a macabre tone amplified by the leg's placement, its owner having presumably collapsed to the floor -- and then, too, he has only one leg, which issues from the wall, as if the architecture had eaten him. For some, it may also have a subtle fetishistic eroticism, inasmuch as it focuses on a narrow band of the body where men routinely and unselfconsciously show their nakedness. Many of the artists who emerged alongside Gober in the 1980s were interested in the modern communications media, or in quoting from art history. Gober, by contrast, insists on the handmade quality of his sculpture, and although his works can remind us of earlier art (this one, for example, may recall the body fragments in the sculpture of Auguste Rodin, or the living disembodied arms bearing candelabra in Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et la b�te, of 1946), their mood of displaced normalcy transforms any such references. These works often evoke the paradoxical phenomenon that Sigmund Freud called "the uncanny" -- something ordinary that, through even a slight disorientation, reveals a hidden strangeness, bringing out long-forgotten fears and collapsing long-established certainties.
15. MOMA2_191221_052.JPG: Catherine Opie Dyke, 1993 Opie, a self-described "twisted social documentary photographer," made pictures in gay, lesbian, and transgender leather-culture circles in Los Angeles during the 1990s. Her series Portraits (1993–96) -- a celebration of her sitters' tattoos, piercings, and clothing, adopted in defiance of mainstream heterosexual culture -- emerged from these collaborations. Here the woman's shorn hair and freckled shoulders frame the tattooed word at the nape of her neck. By taking possession of the label "dyke" through its imprint on her body, she aimed to render the slur powerless. In a broader context, "dyke" has been adopted as a positive term of self-reference by lesbians, whose use of it is intended to disarm derogatory connotations. Opie's work simultaneously satisfies and upends traditional expectations of portraiture. Although her backdrops, poses, and lighting befit the genre, she applies these formal tactics to atypical subjects. Particularly influenced by the portraits of the sixteenth-century German painter Hans Holbein the Younger, Opie's color-intensive backgrounds, like Holbein's, create neutral spaces that focus attention on the person rather than documenting the environment. The blue damask fabric in this work emphasizes the sitter's contours and highlights both her biological and self-selected physical attributes. "I try to present people with an extreme amount of dignity," Opie has said. "They're always going to be stared at, but I try and make the portraits stare back."
16. MOMA2_191221_060.JPG: Isa Genzken Spielautomat (Slot Machine), 1999
17. MOMA2_191221_075.JPG: Bodys Isek Kingelez Kinshasa la Belle, 1991
18. MOMA2_191221_078.JPG: Bodys Isek Kingelez U.N., 1995
19. MOMA2_191221_080.JPG: Julie Mehretu Empirical Construction, Istanbul, 2003 The subject of this painting-drawing hybrid is Istanbul, a city perched on the border between Europe and Asia. The large scale of the work captures the epic dimension of the site, which was a capital of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires. The sweeping scale is also crucial to the picture's impact and reflects Mehretu's interest in epic history painting and her aim to engage the viewer physically. The Hagia Sophia -- an Eastern Orthodox church converted first to a mosque, then to a museum -- occupies the center of this frenzied metropolis. Around it Mehretu has articulated the texture of the city in both its globalized modernity and its specificity, which she reveals through symbols and other signifiers: the star and crescent, flags, and Islamic architectural and decorative motifs. Graphic shapes and expressive marks swarm and obscure these meticulously drawn details. The result is a portrait -- or, better, a palimpsest -- of a city, teeming with details and with ghostly traces, all layered within the thin sheets of acrylic Mehretu sprays onto the canvas, trapping space and time to create provocative metaphors for the creation of cities. "I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics," the artist has reflected, "and that's why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don't think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power."
20. MOMA2_191221_084.JPG: Chen Zhen Un Village sans fronti�res, 2000
21. MOMA2_191221_087.JPG: Chen Zhen Un Village sans fronti�res, 2000
22. MOMA2_191221_088.JPG: Chen Zhen Un Village sans fronti�res, 2000
23. MOMA2_191221_090.JPG: Chen Zhen Un Village sans fronti�res, 2000
24. MOMA2_191221_091.JPG: Ch�ri Samba Water Problem, 2004 According to the United Nations Environment Program, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is Africa's most "water-rich" nation. Yet, in recent years, more than seventy percent of the country's population has faced an acute shortage of clean drinking water. Long focused on issues affecting Congolese society, Samba's painting includes texts in French and Lingala that reference conditions of existence brought about by rapid modernization. Here the artist represents himself on a rocket leaving Earth to look for water on Mars. Suggestive both for its political overtones and in the search's ultimate futility, the artist proposes an intentionally unrealistic solution to his country's ills, underscoring how urgently humanity must adjust its relationship with the environment.
25. MOMA2_191221_101.JPG: Richard Serra's Equal Since the 1960s, the sculptor Richard Serra has explored the basic properties of his medium through the most straightforward yet extraordinary means. Rather than concern himself with images, Serra studies form, including its mass, weight, ability to delineate space, and the ways it behaves under the pressures of gravity. As a result, his sculptures produce in us a heightened awareness of our surroundings. Equal consists of eight forged steel boxes stacked in pairs. Each box measures five by five and a half by six feet and weighs 40 tons in a rectangular cube. To differentiate one stack from another, Serra has rotated the position of the shorter and longer sides of the boxes. Despite the varying orientation of the individual components, each stack measures 11 feet tall. This simple construction -- one block sitting atop another -- yields a variety of experiences; the massive sculpture may overwhelm the viewer and, in this sublimity, invite contemplation.
26. MOMA2_191221_102.JPG: Sheela Gowda's Of All People To make Of All People, Gowda built an environment out of recycled architectural elements -- doorjambs, window frames, and a wooden table -- from houses that were torn down as a result of modernization in her native Bangalore. She painted these components bright yellows, pinks, and turquoises, colors characteristic of homes there, and then populated this setting with thousands of small wooden votive figurines, which are used in certain communal social rituals. Once intricately hand-carved, these figurines are now quickly and cheaply produced by craftspeople, who make three small incisions into the wood to signify a face. Gowda photographed a selection of these "people" and hung them high on the wall, which is where a picture of an elder or an image of a deity might go in an Indian home. Gowda's staged environment and the phantom bodies that inhabit it speak to systems of power that dictate how people live within structures -- whether physical, economic, or ideological.
27. MOMA2_191221_104.JPG: Sheela Gowda's Of All People
28. MOMA2_191221_106.JPG: Agust�n Hern�ndez Navarro Casa en el Aire, Mexico City, Mexico, 1991
29. MOMA2_191221_108.JPG: SITE (Sculpture in the Environment), James Wines Highrise of Homes, project (Exterior perspective), 1981 James Wines, a founding member in 1970 of the SITE (Sculpture In The Environment) architectural group, described the Highrise of Homes project as a "vertical community" to "accommodate people's conflicting desires to enjoy the cultural advantages of an urban center, without sacrificing the private home identity and garden space associated with suburbia." The plan calls for a steel-and-concrete, eight-to-ten-story, U-shaped building frame erected in a densely populated urban area. The developer would sell lots within this frame, each lot the site for a house and garden in a style chosen by the purchaser. The result would be a distinct villagelike community on each floor, with interior streets. A central mechanical core would serve these homes and gardens, while shops, offices, and other facilities on the ground and middle floors would provide for the residents' needs. Whereas urban skyscrapers are normally made up of identical, stacked, boxlike units, the Highrise of Homes would allow flexibility and individual choice. The wide variety of house styles, gardens, hedges, and fences described in this intricate rendering provides a sense of the personal identity and human connection that are generally erased by the austere and repetitive elements of architectural formalism. Placing the sociological and psychological needs of the inhabitant over the aesthetic sensibilities of the architect, Wines produces a merge of suburb and city, a collage of architectures collectively created by its inhabitants and by the art of chance. Developers considered Battery Park City, New York, as a possible location for the project, but it was never built.
30. MOMA2_191221_113.JPG: El Ultimo Grito, Roberto Feo, Rosario Hurtado Imaginary Architectures: Apartment Complex, 2008–2015
31. MOMA2_191221_118.JPG: Agust�n Hern�ndez Navarro Casa en el Aire, Mexico City, Mexico, 1991
32. MOMA2_191221_119.JPG: Fr�d�ric Druot, Anne Lacaton, Jean Philippe Vassal Tour Bois-le-Pr�tre, Paris, France (Model before transformation), 2008 The vehement reaction against 1960s modernist housing has spurred several generations of inventive critiques. Since 1989 and the fall of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the rehabilitation of vast tracts of such housing has become a key political, ecological, and architectural concern. At Bois-le-Pr�tre, formerly a banal modernist housing slab, a new glass shell of balconies completely envelops the existing building, breaking the monotony of the facade and improving the building's insulation. This addition has increased apartment footprints by roughly fifteen percent and provided more natural light and better views. In addition, the floor plans of individual apartments were modified during the redesign and customized to individual needs. The work was done in two parallel phases: as the prefabricated, modular facade structure took shape, the apartment interiors were modified and new openings created in the old exterior walls. Residents could stay in their homes or move into one of eight spare apartments in the building during construction. In a world of diminishing resources, this organic model of transformation and adaptive reuse is ingenious and exemplary.
33. MOMA2_191221_125.JPG: Mark Bradford James Brown is Dead, 2007 "I decided," Bradford reflected, "that I was going to take all my experiences in the world and all that material from the world -- the detritus of the world that we live in, the billboards, the stickiness, the messiness … and I was going to push myself into the center of the room." This work, like many of Bradford's paintings, is made from a range of materials, including posters and advertisements scavenged from the streets. Sometimes images and text emerge in the collaged works, such as the phrase "James Brown is Dead" here, drawn from a headline Bradford saw on a tabloid newspaper following the death of the iconic musician in 2006.
34. MOMA2_191221_128.JPG: Kerry James Marshall Untitled (policeman), 2015 Marshall made this painting at a time when news about police killings of unarmed black men, women, and children was proliferating across the United States, leading to the inception of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though unmistakably topical, the painting offers a somewhat unexpected and challenging visual response to these overwhelming events. Perched on the hood of his squad car, the figure occupies categories often presented in the mass media as implacably antagonistic: he is both a black man and a police officer, seemingly locked into two conflicting identities. Since the 1980s, Marshall's overarching approach has been to introduce the black figure into the legacy of Western art in order to produce what he has called a "counter-archive" of art-historical images. Echoing the traditional three-quarter-view portraiture format, Untitled (policeman) is another effort to inject a visually intense and complex black presence into contemporary painting. Neither a victim nor a hero, the anonymous policeman is no symbol for a cause. His unaffected posture and inscrutable, distant gaze betray a complex and independent individuality, as he deals in solitude with his particular circumstances. The painting's five lampposts and the dominance of blues suggest that this is a nocturnal scene, yet the chromatic uniformity, far from implying an accentuated sense of drama or danger, adds to the work's meditative eloquence and quiet unresolvedness.
35. MOMA2_191221_139.JPG: Kara Walker Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, 2017
36. MOMA2_191221_145.JPG: Jean-Michel Basquiat Glenn, 1985
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Wikipedia Description: Museum of Modern Art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media.

MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It also houses an award-winning fine dining restaurant, The Modern, run by Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther.

History:

The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan. They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism.

Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr Jr., a promising young protege. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Seurat.

First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Abby's husband was adamantly opposed to the museum (as well as to modern art itself) and refused to release funds for the venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the frequent shifts of location. Nevertheless, he eventually donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time, and thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors.

During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the Netherlands, and poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination".

The museum also gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939-40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars and historians. This was wholly masterminded by Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, and the exhibition lionized Picasso as the greatest artist of the time, setting the model for all the museum's retrospectives that were to follow.

When Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity, acquisitions and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller, also joined the museum's board of trustees, in 1948, and took over the presidency when Nelson took up position as Governor of New York in 1958.

David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in general have retained a close association with the museum throughout its history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution since 1947. Both David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller (wife of Senator Jay Rockefeller) currently sit on the board of trustees.

In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Its permanent and current home, now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, and with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Artworks:

Considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces in addition to approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills. The collection houses such important and familiar works as the following:
La Boh�mienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy – Zingara che dorme) by Henri Rousseau, 1897

* The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
* The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
* Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso
* The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dal�
* Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian
* Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol
* The Seed of the Areoi by Paul Gauguin
* Water Lilies triptych by Claude Monet
* The Dance by Henri Matisse
* The Bather by Paul C�zanne
* The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni
* Love Song by Giorgio De Chirico
* Number 31, 1950 by Jackson Pollock
* Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman
* Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth
* Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
* Painting (1946) by Francis Bacon
* Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale by Max Ernst

It also holds works by a wide range of influential American artists including Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, Chuck Close, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Ralph Bakshi.

MoMA developed a world-renowned art photography collection, first under Edward Steichen and then John Szarkowski, as well as an important film collection under The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video. The film collection owns prints of many familiar feature-length movies, including Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but the department's holdings also contains many less-traditional pieces, including Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire and Chris Cunningham's music video for Bj�rk's All Is Full of Love. MoMA also has an important design collection, which includes works from such legendary designers as Paul L�szl�, the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection also contains many industrial and manufactured pieces, ranging from a self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter.

Exhibition houses:

At various points in its history, MoMA has sponsored and hosted temporary exhibition houses, which have reflected seminal ideas in architectural history.

* 1949: exhibition house by Marcel Breuer
* 1950: exhibition house by Gregory Ain
* 1955: Japanese exhibition house
* 2008: Prefabricated houses planned by:
o Kieran Timberlake Architects
o Lawrence Sass
o Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier
o Leo Kaufmann Architects
o Richard Horden

Renovation:

MoMA's midtown location underwent extensive renovations in the early 2000s, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening to the public in a building redesigned by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, on November 20, 2004. From June 29, 2002 until September 27, 2004, a portion of its collection was on display in what was dubbed MoMA QNS, a former Swingline staple factory in the Long Island City section of Queens.

The renovation project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs and features 630,000 square feet (59,000 m2) of new and redesigned space. The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building on the western portion of the site houses the main exhibition galleries, and The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building on the eastern portion provides over five times more space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the museum's expanded Library and Archives. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

MoMA's reopening brought controversy as its admission cost increased from US$12 to US$20, making it one of the most expensive museums in the city; however it has free entry on Fridays after 4pm, thanks to sponsorship from Target Stores. The architecture of the renovation is controversial. At its opening, some critics thought that Taniguchi's design was a fine example of contemporary architecture, while many others were extremely displeased with certain aspects of the design, such as the flow of the space.

MoMA has seen its average number of visitors rise to 2.5 million from about 1.5 million a year before its new granite and glass renovation. The museum's director, Glenn D. Lowry, expects average visitor numbers eventually to settle in at around 2.1 million.

Financial Situation:

Before the economic crisis of late 2008, the MoMA’s board of trustees had Glenn Lowry sell its equities in order to move into an all-cash position. This move is not credited to one specific person, but the board includes banker David Rockefeller, Leon Black, a top person in private-equity, and former PaineWebber CEO Donald Marron.
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