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…
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…
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.
Justino Serralta (Uruguayan, 1919–2011) initially studied under the master of Uruguayan modernist architecture, Julio Vilamajó, but left for Paris upon graduating in 1947 to work with Le Corbusier on two of the Swiss architect’s signature projects: the Unité d’Habitation (1952) housing complex in Marseille and the famous Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (1955). Along…
Luis Pérez-Oramas, MoMA curator and leader of the C-MAP Latin America group, discusses the challenges of collecting art from a region that complicates the art historical narratives by presenting a dynamic archipelago of modernities. I would like to start this essay with a picture of the current Painting and Sculpture Galleries on the fourth floor…
Once in the XX Century, an eight-minute film by Deimantas Narkevičius shows a larger-than-life statue of Vladimir Lenin being erected in Vilnius’s main square to the cheers of a large crowd. MoMA acquired the film in 2011, and in 2013, it was included in the Museum’s Performing Histories (1), an exhibition of recent time-based art…
On June 22, Dr. Sonal Khullar visited with C-MAP and viewed Bhupen Khakhar’s painting Kali (1965). This painting, which MoMA purchased in 1967, is one of the artist’s early works. Less researched, it was made when he was still developing his vernacular language for what would later be considered Indian Pop art. In this video,…
