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,…
A series of twelve black and white photographs from MoMA’s Photography Study Collection—each depicting a woman’s hands performing various gestures against a neutral background—have recently been the focus of renewed scholarly interest at the Museum. The prints, grouped in three sets of four and attached to one another with transparent tape, compose three vertical columns…
In 1936, the year after Kazimir Malevich’s death, Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński and his students in Łódź produced an album in honor of the Russian avant-garde master. Malevich’s legacy in Poland was well established by that time: his radical work in abstraction and Suprematism was embraced by artists and architects in the 1920s, many of…
While going through MoMA’s Czech holdings during my Fulbright Research Fellowship at the Museum, I came across a surprising finding: the first Czech objects ever acquired by MoMA were a glass tumbler and two bowls designed by a young student, Věra Lišková (1924–1979) circa 1947, when Czechoslovakia was still part of the industrialized Western world.…
Czech artist Běla Kolářová was a key figure in Prague’s intellectual circles in the decade of the 1960s, a time of great optimism in Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia, one of both relative political freedom and cultural searching. The home she shared with her partner, the artist and poet Jiří Kolář, was the center of a progressive artistic…
We live in a world of unedited images. Pictures are present in our most private chambers and on the most public social-media platforms. Photography is without question the lingua franca of our time, even if the nature and ubiquity of photographs have been marked by a turn toward digital means of capturing and storing images.…
The book Striptease by Sonia Švecová (Czech, born 1946) is one of many little-known gems within the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift at MoMA . Švecová was born in 1946 in the former Czechoslovakia and was a central figure in Aktualní Umeni (also known as Aktual Art or simply Aktual), a small group of artists based in…
Renowned Chilean critic Adriana Valdés visited the Museum in April 2015 to speak to the C-MAP Latin America group about the Chilean art scene and the work of Eugenio Dittborn. During her visit, she generously agreed to record a video interview and share her thoughts and memories of the Chilean art world before and after…
Tomislav Gotovac—the influential avant-garde filmmaker, conceptual artist, and anarchist leader of Croatian performance art—occupies an authorial position within the alternative New Art Practice of the late 1960s in the former Yugoslavia. After studying film directing at the Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, Gotovac made his first experimental films, inaugurating the golden…
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…
Anna Maria Maiolino (Brazilian, born Italy, 1942) refers to Trajetória I (1976) as a “Book Object,” a term that aptly describes the way it combines aspects of a book with those of a sculpture. Although comprised of eleven folios of black, white, and red papers bound into a black paper cover, it does not include text or…
Renowned Chilean art critic, Adriana Valdés, visited MoMA to talk about the works of Eugenio Dittborn. During her visit, she not only thoroughly discussed the importance and semantic weight of Dittborn’s Airmail Paintings, but she also described the peculiarities of the Chilean art scene, one that Dittborn himself has identified as “a sort of small…
