Visiting NYC’s THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, extensively renovated and expanded

One of the most influential museums of contemporary and modern art has just reopened to great acclaim. With a physical expansion, as well as a new curatorial approach that redefines how we think about modern and contemporary art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has made a great leap into the future.

A new start for MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) reopened in October 2019. A nearly 4,000-square-meter expansion has increased the museum’s floor space by 30 percent, allowing MoMA to display approximately 2,500 of the 200,000 works in its collection at once—an increase from the previous average of 1,500 works on view. Since 30 percent of the galleries are reinstalled every six months, the public will have more opportunities to see some of the rare, historically valuable works in MoMA’s collection. The new MoMA is not just physically bigger, however; it also encapsulates a new curatorial approach.

“It used to be the case that if you wanted to see photography, you had to go to the 3rd floor, and if you wanted to see drawing, you had to go to the 2nd floor,” says Sarah Suzuki, curator and director of the opening of the new museum. “Now, we think about all these mediums—photography, painting, sculpture, film, architecture, and design—holistically and think about the stories they tell when we bring them all together. The collection galleries are arranged chronologically, but rather than being structured by -isms, each gallery tells a story. It may be about a particular place, a particular year, a challenge that artists were facing, or a group of artists that came together.” Suzuki adds that due to the size of MoMA’s collection, the museum is able to share such broad views of art.

For example, in the 5th floor “Paris 1920s” gallery, you will find a Constantin Brâncuși sculpture sitting beside a painting by his contemporary, Picasso, to tell a story about a place and time that does not adhere to strict artistic definitions.

“There are really so many ways to think about what is happening in the art world,” Suzuki says. “This is just one of many. We hope to get away from the sense that there is just one story about how modern and contemporary art developed, and help people understand that there are many different stories, and they all happen simultaneously all over the world.”

These are the MoMA employees who we interviewed. From left to right, they are Rob Baker, Michelle Chan, Sarah Suzuki, and Andrew Gardner. The minimalist staircase in the background is one of the new MoMA’s architectural highlights. Natural light pours in through the glass exterior, which faces 53rd Street.

MoMA’s new curatorial approach also intends to make us question the current definitions of art. Andrew Gardner, a curatorial assistant in MoMA’s department of architecture and design, has a strong interest in works that can be categorized as both art and design. He brings up mingei (Japanese craft arts) as an example.

“The way in which the mingei movement developed in Japan shows how the world outside of the United States and Europe saw crafts as part of artistic practice,” he says, “which is how we are beginning to think now. One thing I’m currently excited about is the display of George Ohr ceramics on the 5th floor. He worked around 1900 in the American South, at a similar moment as Van Gogh, whose work, The Starry Night, is on display in the same gallery as the Ohr works. The idea of two people in two very different places experimenting with new ideas and artistic expression and different kinds of media in the same period is really exciting.”

Another exciting aspect of the new MoMA is the incorporation of more works by artists whose voices have often been ignored in the past—such as women and African Americans, as well as artists based in Japan and India— to break free of the New York and Paris bias of modern and contemporary art. It is an extension of the progressive work that MoMA has been doing—notably its decision to treat film and architecture as art and display them alongside paintings and sculptures—since its opening in 1929.
MoMA is currently closed due to COVID-19, but you can enjoy more than 88,000 works online. Let's look forward to the day when it will be opened again.

From the MoMA Collection to a T-shirt

UNIQLO has enjoyed a partnership with MoMA since 2013 under the banner, “Art for all.” One initiative that has developed from this partnership is the weekly UNIQLO Free Friday Nights, when visitors may enter the museum for free from 5:30 to 9 p.m. Another is a series of UT shirts featuring works from the MoMA Collection.

The new UT collection is called Text Messages and features the works of artists such as Jenny Holzer, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Robert Indiana, who use text in their art.UNIQLO’s design team has reinterpreted these works and transformed them into brand new T-shirt graphics. Michelle Chan, MoMA’s retail licensing manager, says that the text-based nature of the collection is very much of its time—and that the collection could not have happened even just five years ago.