MoMA’s curators, selected staff, and specialist invitees each pick individual works in MoMA’s collection and discuss the particularities of the chosen piece and its relationship to other works housed within the Museum. Several of the works included here entered MoMA’s holdings as a result of Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), a research initiative begun at the Museum in 2009, which has focused on tracing artistic legacies in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. However, MoMA’s inclusion of works from these regions predates this endeavor, which is something also evinced here. C-MAP’s efforts both to promote a deeper understanding of works already in MoMA’s collection and to instigate a broader perspective on how other geographical histories might relate to MoMA’s context, reflect a history of modern and contemporary art premised on international travel, networks, and connections.
Encompassing historical as well as contemporary objects in a diversity of mediums, this Theme in effect serves to mimic the structure of a museum’s collection: Artworks created in disparate locales and in different moments in time find themselves in chance adjacency and juxtaposition, prompting reflection on similarities and differences, and deeper investigations of the contexts within which each work of art was produced. This body of objects does not tell one particular story; instead it enables multiple stories to be told, including the inclusion of formerly underrepresented voices, and offers a site for contemplating the difficulties and possibilities of writing a globally-comprehensive history of art.
In Campesinos Testifying, Palace of Justice, Cuzco (c. 1929) by Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973), six Andean peasants huddle together at the Cuzco courthouse—four on a wooden bench and two standing behind them. Behind this group, two men are seated along a wall and, to their right, two functionaries sit at a table, one bent…
The work of Nigerian woman artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1928–2003) offers a window into cultural representations of African men and women in postcolonial Nigeria. In what was a male-dominated art scene in the 1960s, Ugbodaga-Ngu stood out not only because of her visual production, but also because of her intellectual involvement as a faculty member…
Joshua Chambers-Letson extrapolates antinomies from Danh Vo’s Death Sentence, a work on paper in MoMA’s collection, in particular the coexistence of values related to life and death.
Gee Wesley writes about Sandra Mujinga’s Flo (2019). On view in MoMA’s Contemporary Collection Galleries from March 2023, Flo considers darkness and disappearance as a means of remaining illegible to technologies of surveillance and data capture.
Artist and author Nene Aissatou Diallo revisits Safi Faye’s 1982 portrayal of Selbé, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of eight from Fad’jal as she and her compatriots go about their daily routines, carried by song. This feature reflects on the visual portrayal of Selbé, and Faye’s use of the camera in a documentary produced as part of the series As Women See It.
The author applies what they call “a Buddhist reading” to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (rucksack installation), 1993, analyzing it alongside recent developments in contemporary Thai art and politics.
Collaborating artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho take a speculative approach to Alfonso Ossorio’s sculpture, currently on view in Gallery 415, attempting to locate an insurgent potential bubbling underneath the picture’s baroque aesthetic.
By way of Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956), a painting featured in our “One Work, Many Voices” series, which focuses on individual artworks chosen from MoMA’s collection, art historian Gabriella Nugent highlights the role of memory in Ntiro’s practice. She argues that these memories are a product of distance and thus complicate the frameworks of art history.
In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text. Storyteller and lens-based artist Jumoke Sanwo reads this image, produced during Nigeria’s nationalist drive and considers Ojeikere’s subjects and their unapologetic defiance.
In 1964, Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919–1988) exposed the anatomy of a painting by stripping canvas from a stretcher. For this work, which she created that year while living in São Paulo, Schendel left only a few traces of canvas, which can still be found tangled in the tacks that originally fastened it to the wooden support.
A conversation between the artist Emilija Škarnulytė, Sophie Cavoulacos, and Valentine Umansky on two of Emilija’s upcoming projects: An Evening with Emilija Škarnulytė, streaming online as part of MoMA’s Virtual Cinema series, and a presentation at Tate Modern.
This year’s C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations, comprised four panels that took place on Zoom in June 2021. With this text, Dr. Riánsares Lozano de la Pola provides a reflection on Politics of Position, the fourth and final panel of the seminar series with Jeannine Tang, Jaanus Samma, and Irmgard Emmelhainz.
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