Picturing Cuba
Sarah Meister explores photography’s capacity to represent temporal dislocations.
Sarah Meister
Former Curator, Photography, The Museum of Modern Art
Sarah Meister became a Curator at The Museum of Modern Art in 2009, having joined the Department of Photography in 1997. Her exhibitions include From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (2015; co- curator), Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949 (2014-15; co-curator), Nicholas Nixon: Forty Years of The Brown Sisters (2014); Walker Evans American Photographs, 75th anniversary (2013-14), and Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light (2013). Meister contributes to and edits a variety of Museum and external publications including most recently Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now (2015). Articles pertaining to her C-MAP research appear in Aperture magazine on Regina Silveira (#215, Summer 2014) and Horacio Coppola (#213, Winter 2013). Meister has been responsible for a number of acquisitions by Latin American artists including Iñaki Bonillas, Oscar Bony, Horacio Coppola, Alfredo Cortina, Geraldo de Barros, Sara Facio, Paulo Gasparini, Alair Gomes, Carlos Herrera, Eduardo Hirose, Liliana Porter, and Regina Silveira. Many of these were exhibited in American Photography: Recent Acquisitions from The Museum of Modern Art (2014; co-curated, in conjunction with Paris Photo 2014 at the Grand Palais). She holds an AB in Art History from Princeton University, with honors, and is a recipient of the Lee Tenenbaum Award for outstanding research and scholarship.
Growing Seeds of Thought: 10 Days in Colombia
Throughout 2016, the C-MAP Latin America Group focused on the study and research of Colombian modern and contemporary artistic practices. The group held more than twenty meetings where scholars, artists, and curators were invited to present their work and talk about the historical, political, and social conditions that have shaped modern and contemporary art scene…
MoMA Goes to Chile
During the last week of September, members of the C-MAP Latin America group traveled to Chile. This trip was part of a research focus on that country which, over the past year, has brought a number of artists, scholars, critics and curators to MoMA–all this in an effort to better understand the complexities of the…
Enigmas: The Works of Regina Silveira
In the shadow of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Regina Silveira pursued an elusive art, by necessity and by design. Absence and isolation, illusion and distortion were not only promising artistic strategies, but also richly meaningful metaphors in an era of severe political repression. Trained as a painter and printmaker in her native Porto Alegre, Silveira…
MoMA in Mexico
The C-MAP Latin America research group spent a week in Mexico City in August 2014, visiting the Distrito Federal’s major institutions, flourishing gallery scene, artists’ studios, and architectural sites. The group also celebrated the project Poema Colectivo 2014 and participated in a roundtable at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) with Mexico City–based curators. Throughout the…
Two Brazilian Cities: São Paulo and Rio via Inhotim
The research project C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives) is built upon research that happens both within and outside MoMA. In November 2012, a group of curators, educators, and editorial staff from MoMA spent ten days in Brazil. All through the preceding year, the C-MAP Latin America group had attended lectures, roundtables, and seminars on twentieth-century art…