VISITING MOMA

I love visiting the Museum of Modern Art. There are many amazing museums and galleries in NYC but we always manage to fit in a trip to the MOMA -my dad is a member of some sort and can get us tickets. I always find their exhibitions to be excellent, especially the past few years since they offer free devices for an audio tour for each exhibit. I love walking through the museum with these; you get a sense of history and story behind the pieces as well as a behind the scenes look to how the exhibit was curated. After a really good one, I feel as though I've finished reading a great book or heard an interesting lecture- it invigorates and inspires. 

This post may be boring if you have no interest in modern art, but I want to jot these quick notes down to remember how much I appreciated this trip!

The first exhibit we saw was, "How Should We Live? Propositions for a Modern Interior", which was fascinating 1) because it focused on women architect designers from the 1920-50s and 2) this is something that I think about a lot. The exhibit explored the "complex collaborations, materials, and processes that have shaped the modernist interior, with a focus on specific environments—domestic interiors, re-created exhibition displays, and retail spaces—from the 1920s to the 1950s."

I am a nerd! I love this stuff! 

A chart trying to answer the question of "What is a House?"

The exhibit included a contemporary evocation of Lilly Reich’s 1927 Velvet-Silk Café exhibition in Weimar-era Berlin, where you could sit and drink some (really good) coffee and imagine what it must have been like to experience such an interior during that time. The cafe set up was in front of one of the huge wall to ceiling windows, and this was the view out the window.  Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the actual cafe. I was too busy sitting in it and having a conversation with my mom.

We also went to go look at the exhibit called, "From the Collection: 1960-1969", which was a display of works from all of MoMA’s curatorial departments and the Museum Archives. The exhibit was organized by year, so you would walk from one year into the next when you walked into a room and it was really neat to see the changes and developments in mediums and expression throughout that time period. 

The third exhibit we saw was Francis Picabia's "Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction" and I loved this one. I had never heard of Picabia before but this exhibit displayed the entire gamut of his work, which was incredibly diverse. I was exhilarated by how often he switched styles in an effort to explore, grow, experiment and challenge himself and his contemporaries. He was fearless in trying things and I took a couple of mental and emotional notes from his book.

MOMA's description of the exhibit captures it well: "He vigorously avoided any singular style, and his work encompassed painting, poetry, publishing, performance and film. Though he is best known as one of the leaders of the Dada movement, his career ranged widely—and wildly—from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from Dadaist provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based realism to art informel. Picabia’s consistent inconsistencies, his appropriative strategies, and his stylistic eclecticism, along with his skeptical attitude, make him especially relevant for contemporary artists, and his career as a whole challenges familiar narratives of the avant-garde.... The exhibition aims to advance the understanding of Picabia’s relentless shape-shifting, and how his persistent questioning of the meaning and purpose of art ensured his iconoclastic legacy’s lasting influence."