New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is the place to be if you want to learn about modern and contemporary art. For nearly a century, the museum has played a major role in the collection of modern architecture, design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and digital media.
MoMA was founded by art patrons Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who sought in the late 1920s to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums and to establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art. Currently located in midtown Manhattan, the museum receives about seven million visitors each year, making it one of the most popular art destinations in the world.
In 2019, MoMA reopened after a four-month closure with the addition of a new building, designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, adding some 40,000 additional square feet to its exhibition space. It also revamped its approach to showing its collection—which now includes nearly 200,000 artworks spanning the last 150 years—rotating it every few months and creating mini-exhibitions devoted to specific artists, eras mediums, or ideas. Below, MoMA’s assistant director for curatorial affairs, Heidi Hirschl Orley, suggests works of interest currently on display from the museum’s holdings.
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Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Joseph Roulin, 1889 (Floor 5, 502)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of his postman and friend, Joseph Roulin was included in MoMA’s very first exhibition, “Van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, and Gauguin,” in November 1929. In a gallery dedicated to that show, some of the pieces are reunited. Departing from a traditional presentation, the room provides a different point of entry: one that grounds MoMA’s beginnings.
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Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand, 1907 (Floor 5, 504)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. This self-portrait by Paula Modersohn-Becker is one of the earliest paintings by a female artist currently on display in a gallery showcasing German and Austrian art from the early 20th century. It captures the pregnant artist resting one hand on her belly and holding two blossoming flowers in the other. The painting was made the same year as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, which hangs right next door, making the case for Modersohn-Becker’s importance in the art-historical canon.
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Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910 (Floor 5, 503)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Henri Rousseau’s large tableau The Dream has moved around a lot throughout the museum, but when MoMA constructed its new building, a space with a long view was created for Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avingnon. However, The Dream was placed there instead. A toll and tax collector by trade, Rousseau was self-taught. His scenes of jungles and deserts—all imagined—influenced a number of avant-garde artists of the day, including Picasso, Max Beckmann, and the Surrealists.
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Henri Matisse, The Blue Window, 1913 (Floor 5, 506)
Image Credit: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2023 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Blue Window is the only view that Henri Matisse painted of the exterior of his studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux. It hangs in a gallery dedicated to the artist, where a recent show built around his “Red Studio” pieces included this one.
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Eileen Gray, T3-12 (E-1027), c. 1935 (Floor 5, 513)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Eileen Gray was an architect and designer whose work bridges the architecture and design collections at MoMA. The museum is using its rotations of the collection to assess where it needs to add pieces to its holdings—and this was one such place. Though the museum already owned a decorative screen by Gray, it recently acquired a trio of small maquettes, including T3-12 (E-1027), that are now on view in the same gallery as the screen. These studies give a sense of the artist’s creative process, offering a deeper understanding of her finished work.
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Jacob Lawrence, The railroad stations in the South were crowded with people leaving for the North, 1940-41 (Floor 5, 520)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2023 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” of which this painting is a part, and Elizabeth Catlett’s “The Black Woman” series (see below) are in dialogue with each other in this gallery. The entire “Migration” series, comprising 60 tempera paintings on board depicting the exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North beginning in the 1910s, is jointly owned by MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Now, at the end of the fifth-floor collection galleries, where viewers arrive chronologically at the 1930s and ’40s, 30 paintings from it have been paired with the Catlettt series they inspired. Here, both artists use a serial narrative form, with sequential images and descriptive titles, to tell stories of the Black experience.
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Elizabeth Catlett, I Have Special Reservations, 1946 (Floor 5, 520)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2023 Mora-Catlett Family/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Catlett saw Lawrence’s “Migration” paintings shortly after they were made in New York and six years later created a series of prints in response—this one addressing the resilience of the working-class Black woman. I Have Special Reservations shows an African American woman in the colored section of a bus during segregation. The newly acquired series lent itself to an installation showing the interconnection between two artists.
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Julie Mehretu, Epigraph, Damascus, 2016 (Floor 5, 522)
Image Credit: Niels Borch Jensen. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. This massive, 12-panel print by Julie Mehretu was recently acquired and went on view for the first time in April in the fifth-floor gallery “Responding to War.” Primarily centered on works made during and in the aftermath of WWII, the display has been intentionally chronologically interrupted by Mehrutu’s piece, which is based on architectural drawings of buildings in the war-torn city of Damascus, Syria.
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Mark Rothko, No. 1 (Untitled), 1948 (Floor 4, 403)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Located in a gallery devoted to the work of Mark Rothko, this early painting foreshadows his Color Field canvases, which he began making a year later. Within it, one can see hints of the blocky forms and subtle color shifts that Rothko would perfect in his better-known pieces.
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Ellsworth Kelly, Sketchbook #26, New York City, 1954–1956 (Floor 4, 416)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. This sketchbook belonging to Ellsworth Kelly is one of a selection of the artist’s notebooks currently on view as part of the centennial celebration of his birth. Installed in a gallery overlooking one of Kelly’s large sculptures, they are paired with related drawings and canvases. For the first time, viewers are able to see the relationship between Kelly’s finished works and his sketchbooks, which he kept private for the majority of his life and career. There are spreads on view in vitrines that show the artist experimenting with ideas ideas in pencil, watercolor, and collage. A few of the sketchbooks have been digitized and projected onto a wall so that viewers can see them in their entirety.
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Ernest Cole, Untitled, 1967 (Floor 4, 409)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Ernest Cole/Magnum Photos. An image from Ernest Cole’s 1967 photographic series “House of Bondage,” this picture captures two young Black boys during South Africa’s Apartheid period (1948–1990s). South Africa’s first Black freelance photojournalist, Cole exposed the hardship visited on the country’s Black population by Apartheid’s racial segregation and minority rule—one whose legacy can still be seen today.
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Alberto Giacometti, Tall Figure, III, 1960 (Floor 4, 400)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Succession Alberto Giacometti/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2023. Cast in bronze, Alberto Giacometti’s Tall Figure, III is currently on view in a pairing with a work by Barbara Chase-Riboud, The Albino (see below). Both artists were expats in Paris, but they were from different generations and made work in completely different styles. Both sculptors, however, considered the human form. The Giacometti plasters on view in an accompanying showcase have never before been seen in the United States.
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Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963 (Floor 4, 413)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Agnes Martin Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Seemingly simple, Agnes Martin’s abstract paintings emphasize line, grid, and subtle color. This piece is a very nontraditional take on Martin’s minimalist style. One of only three paintings Martin made incorporating gold leaf as a material, it plays the richness of the gold against the severity of the artist’s signature grids.
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James Rosenquist, Doorstop, 1963 (Floor 4, 412)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York, courtesy the James Rosenquist Foundation. Artwork copyright © 2023 James Rosenquist Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Entering the gallery devoted to Pop art, a lot of people fail to notice this James Rosenquist installation because it’s hung from the ceiling. Unless you know to look for it or happen to glimpse the label, it’s easy to miss. A painting of an apartment floor plan, Doorstop incorporates a number of lightbulbs, one of which is usually not on. Some observant visitors report this to the museum, but it’s supposed to be that way.
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Kate Millett, Piano & Stool, 1965 (Floor 4, 412)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Kate Millett Trust, courtesy Salon 94, New York. Kate Millett’s installation Piano & Stool, a hand-carved wood piano and piano stool, can be found in the same gallery as the Rosenquist. Under the rubric of “Domestic Disruption” the room’s current selection of Pop art works focuses on artists’ various takes on 1960s consumer culture and quotidian life. Millett was known as a feminist writer and activist, but as this piece attests, she also made whimsical and witty sculptures, usually from found objects.
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Betye Saar, Phrenology Man Digs Sol y Luna, 1966 (Floor 4, 408)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. In this etching, renowned assemblage artist Betye Saar plays with the now-debunked pseudoscience phrenology—which linked the size and shape of one’s head with character and mental capabilities—tying it to the divinatory practice of astrology. Saar had a retrospective exhibition at MoMA in 2019, and the museum holds a number of her works on paper.
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John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem, 1968 (Floor 4, 414)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy The John Giorno Foundation. This interactive piece by artist and poet John Giorno invites visitors to pick up a phone and dial a number to hear one of 200 randomized poems—some of them dirty, others sincere—written and recorded by Giorno and his peers. MoMA originally showed the work in 1970 as part of its seminal 1970 exhibition “Information.”
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Idelle Weber, Untitled, 1968–1970 (Floor 4, 407)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2023 Estate of Idelle Weber/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. If you’ve watched the television series Mad Men, then you might recognize these works as the inspiration for the show’s opening credits. Until recently Pop artist Idelle Weber was underknown, but her pieces have lately been showing up regularly in such exhibitions as the Brookln Museum’s 2010 show “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958–1968.” The trio of silkscreened acrylic cubes were acquired not long before the museum’s 2019 reopening; they currently reside in a gallery dedicated to artworks from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s made from the relatively new medium of Plexiglas.
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Barbara Chase-Riboud, The Albino, 1972 (Floor 4, 400)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. There’s a great interplay between Barbara Chase-Riboud’s and Giacometti’s works in this gallery, even though their art is quite different. Both Chase-Riboud’s The Albino and Giacometti’s Tall Figure III have stretched-out forms, but while the latter is attenuated and rigid, the former appears softer and more open. Though Chase-Riboud visited Giacometti and had a working relationship with him, their work isn’t often paired together.
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T.C. Cannon, Two Guns Arikara, 1973/1977 (Floor 4, 415)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Estate of T.C. Cannon. This canvas by Kiowa-Caddo artist T.C. Cannon is one of the first paintings by a Native American artist to be acquired by MoMA. It currently hangs in a gallery, dubbed “The Divided States of America,” that focuses on activist and socially conscious art of the 1960s and 1970s. Depicting a Native American man with two guns laid casually across his lap, the work is an important precursor to the figurative paintings of contemporary artists of color such as Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and others.
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Geta Brătescu, Untitled from the portfolio Portraits of Medea (Portretele Medeei), 1979 (Floor 4, 420)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the estate of Geta Brătescu and Hauser & Wirth. This lithograph, currently on view in a room on the fourth floor featuring women artists, is a great entry point into the multidisciplinary work of Romanian artist Geta Brătescu, showcasing the kinetic linework that is characteristic of her drawings. Though Brătescu shied away from politics and feminism, she often used Greek mythology to explore the complications of womanhood. In the tale of Medea, the enchantress famously helps Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, in his quest to obtain the Golden Fleece.
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Howardena Pindell, Free, White and 21, 1980 (Floor 2, 201)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Artist Howardena Pindell has a personal history with the museum, having worked as MoMA’s first Black curator. This video, which was installed about one year ago, speaks to her experience and memories as a Black woman in America. In it, she recounts her and her mother’s encounters with racism, intermittently disrupting the narrative by appearing in whiteface and making disparaging comments.
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Joey Terrill, Chicanos Invade New York Series, 1981 (Floor 2, 202)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist. This series of three Joey Terrill paintings hangs in a gallery focused on New York in the 1980s. It’s set of vignettes that illustrate the feelings of displacement that the artist—a gay Chicano from Los Angeles—felt during a brief sojourn in New York City, as he stands in front of the Guggenheim Museum (titled Searching for Burritos), makes tortillas (Making Tortillas in Soho), and reads a newspaper (Reading the Local Paper). This is the recently acquired paintings’ first time on view.
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Julia Lohmann, “Waltraud” Cow-Bench, 2004 (Floor 2, 216)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist. In the gallery “Systems,” which considers networks of production, German-born designer Julia Lohmann’s leather bench in the shape of a headless, hoofless, hideless cow is situated next to an enlarged Google Maps “pin” (designed by Jens Eilstrup Ramussen in 2005) Though somewhat odd, juxtapositions like this one feel increasingly relevant in today’s world, where real human labor and resource extraction coexist with algorithmic processing. Here, Lohmann asks us to consider our relationship to other animals and to the products and byproducts of the meat industry.
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Sandra Mujinga, Flo, 2019 (Floor 2, 213)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist. This is the first time that Sandra Mujinga’s holographic installation Flo (titled after the artist’s mother) has been shown at MoMA. Like Lorna Simpson’s Wigs, Flo is about possibilities—here, the potential for people of color—historically often either invisible or surveilled—to occupy an infinite number of spaces and personas. In it, a performer, clad in a wearable sculpture made by Mujinga, appears to float in the gallery, slipping in and out of view depending on the viewer’s position.
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Michael Armitage, Curfew (Likoni March 27 2020), 2022 (Floor 2, 215)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery. This painting by British-Kenyan artist Michael Armitage, whose works often deal with current events in Kenya, is a recent acquisition. Made during the pandemic, the painting features figures that appear to be both coming together and breaking apart, reflecting the uncertainty of the time in which they were created. Armitage was part of the “Projects” show, organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, that was part of and on view when MoMA’s newest building first reopened.
