Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
NEW YORK CITY
Any visit to New York City would be incomplete without a visit to MoMA! Dedicated to helping people understand and enjoy the visual arts of our time, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, founded in 1929 by avid art collector Alfred H. Barr, Jr., has become a primary location to view mid-century modern American, European, and Latin American Art. The museum, renovated no fewer than half a dozen times, grew from a gift of eight prints and one drawing to a collection encompassing more than 150,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and design objects. MoMA has so many objects in its collection that it stores much of its holdings in a massive warehouse across the East River in Queens (which also served as exhibition space during the most recent renovation). MoMA owns a number of films (some 20,000), and globe-trotting scholars of modern art take advantage of more than 4 million film stills in its extensive library and research archives.
The city of New York is home to hundreds of museums and cultural institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In 2000, MoMA partnered with the independent exhibition space P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (which began life as a public school in Long Island City, New York), combining MoMA’s collection resources with P.S.1’s contemporary programming. Today, the museum and P.S.1 welcome thousands of visitors every year who enjoy a wide variety of artwork, including seminal paintings by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso, as well as more contemporary works by Matthew Barney and Rachel Whiteread. —SBR