Jennifer Tobias

In Xu Bing’s Cropland, part of the Series of Five Repetitions (1987-88), Chinese characters double as landscape depiction, creating a liminal work that resonates between word and image, representation and abstraction.

MoMA librarian Jennifer Tobias takes a recent trip to the Paper Conservation Lab as a jumping off point to explore the ins and outs of mechanical reproduction in the 1920s. Specifically, she takes a close look at a series of images in a set of avant-garde Czech magazines, to explore questions around how photographs were shared for publication across the country, and abroad.

In late January 2016, a team of seven from The Museum of Modern Art’s C-MAP Asia Group traveled to India and Bangladesh. The itinerary began in New Delhi, where the India Art Fair was underway, continuing on to Goa and Bangalore (with side-trips to Baroda and Bombay by individual group members), and concluding in Dhaka…

Preservation and reuse drive the art-driven adaptation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture in cities across India, including Kochi, Goa, Mumbai. This essay explores how such sites can be spaces not just of preservation but of alternative making and institutional critique. From the 1960s revival of SoHo in downtown Manhattan to the 2009 opening of the Sharjah…

In this essay, Jennifer Tobias, Reader Services Librarian, MoMA Library looks at the history of MoMA through the direct engagement of the artist. This research was presented in her exhibition Messing With MoMA: Critical Interventions at the Museum of Modern Art, 1939–Now (July 1–November 29, 2015), which documented seven decades of interventions by artists, the general public,…

In March 2015 MoMA’s C-MAP Asia team took a nine-day research trip to Sharjah and three cities in India. This was C-MAP’s very first field trip focused on India, however not the first time MoMA curators have conducted research in the country. Besides the Sharjah Biennial 12: (The Past, the Present, the Possible), the second Kochi…