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Meghan Forbes examines the ways interwar periodicals blurred the boundaries between art and advertisement, creating international networks of exchange.

MoMA PS1 Associate Curator Jenny Schlenzka on the Taiwanese artist’s innovative posters documenting some of his extreme performances in New York City in the 1980s. The four posters in the collection of MoMA’s Library are part of One Year Performance 1981–1982 by Tehching Hsieh (Taiwanese, born 1950). To complete this work, which is often referred to as Outdoor…

Jorge Schwartz discusses the prominence of the urban in Joaquín Torres-García’s visual and literary works. A major retrospective at MoMA, The Arcadian Modern, reveals a totalizing and structural vision of Joaquín Torres-García’s thinking, mainly through his painting, sculpture, objects, and, of particular interest to me, bibliographic production: his theoretical texts about Constructivism, autobiographical texts, manifestos,…

The artists’ book movement in Mexico evolved as a “direct consequence of many complex circumstances in keeping with the mood of the times,” according to Felipe Ehrenberg, an artist, writer, and neologist. Upon Ehrenberg’s return from…

Artist and critic Luis Camnitzer discusses his personal relationship to the work and legacy of Joaquín Torres-García with special attention to his influential Taller and the recent exhibition at MoMA. I am at a point in my life when I have made complete peace with Joaquín Torres-García. It took a long time. Growing up in…

Art historian Klara Kemp-Welch draws parallels between artists of disparate avant-gardes whose claims over spaces in the 1960s and 1970s were political gestures. How are we to navigate the historical fields of experimental art in state socialist Eastern Europe and under Latin American military dictatorships? What happens when pedagogy, poetry, sculpture, and sociability bleed into…

Curator Juliet Kinchin addresses graphic images that spurred revolution in Budapest in 1919. Many avant-garde movements in Europe around the time of World War I were linked to radical politics, and in those stormy years, a generation of artists in Budapest created provocative newspaper illustrations, banners, and public posters in a new genre of graphic…

Curator Luis Pérez-Oramas reflects on bringing these important contemporary Colombian drawings into MoMA’s collection. Colombian contemporary art has been notably characterized since the beginning of the twenty-first century by a renewal of the practice of drawing, that is, by an expansion of drawing, which has coincided with the exhaustion of a major civic and military…

Assistant Curator Lilian Tone reflects on the origin of Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s Corners series. Virtual Spaces: Corner 1 (1967–68) simulates, with a twist, the corner of a domestic room, complete with parquet flooring, a painted baseboard, and canvas-covered walls. It is the first of a series of works that marked a breakthrough in Cildo…

Art historian Daniel Quiles focuses on examples from the Transmissions exhibition to show how Argentine conceptualists of the late 60s converted information from one medium to another. This phenomenon shifted to the transmission of social and political information, causing artistic practices to leave national borders and connect beyond the region. One of the earliest Argentine…

The Iberê Camargo Foundation, a museum in Porto Alegre designed by Álvaro Siza Vieira (Portuguese, 1933–) and devoted to one of Brazil’s most renowned artists, features nine galleries stacked in a vertical volume from which undulating passages in white concrete cantilever to connect the building’s different public levels. The building’s form reveals a multiplicity of…

In Fall 2014, the Library at The Museum of Modern Art was very lucky to have acquired this pamphlet of Kantor’s Happening from 1967. It is now catalogued and available for public researchers, who may request to see and (gently) handle this vibrant illustration of early Polish performance art.