![The newly expanded and renovated Museum of Modern Art designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.](http://www.sgfara.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/GettyImages-528822936-1.jpg)
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 and display 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 establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art. 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.
MoMA has expanded several times over the decades to accommodate its burgeoning collection. Most recently, in 2019, it reopened after a four-month closure with a new building, designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, which added some 40,000 square feet to its exhibition space. The museum also revamped its approach to showing its collection—which now includes nearly 200,000 artworks spanning 150 years—rotating it every few months and creating mini-exhibitions devoted to specific artists, eras, mediums, or ideas. Below, MoMA’s manager of collection galleries in the department of curatorial affairs, Lydia Mullin, suggests works of interest from the museum’s holdings currently on display.
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Paul Cézanne, The Bather, ca. 1885 (Floor 5, 503)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Paul Cézanne’s painting of a young male bather is atmospheric and rooted in Impressionism. Here, the artist renders perspective solely through the application of various shades of blue and gray. The work had been on view with some of its peers in a gallery dedicated to MoMA’s very first exhibition, “Van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, and Gauguin,” staged in November 1929. It can now be found in gallery 503, in company with its Cubist successors.
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Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Joseph Roulin, 1889 (Floor 5, 504)
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. Like Cézanne’s Bathers, it had been on view in a gallery dedicated to that show. It subsequently moved to gallery 504, which revolves around the Vienna Secession art movement formed by a group of Austrian painters at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Josef and Jacob Kohn, Child’s cradle (model 1573), ca. 1895 (Floor 5, 504)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. This cradle is in the Vienna Secession gallery, which opened in July 2023. There it’s in dialogue with other design objects and furniture, posters from Secession exhibitions, and paintings by artists who were part of the movement, along with some interlopers like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who was a member of the Neue Secession.
This cradle is included as a precursor to many of the works in the gallery. It is durable, light, and innovative in form, and in its construction—it is made from steam-molded bentwood pieces—it presaged the predominant Art Nouveau style of the movement.
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Henri Matisse, Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal), early 1914 (Floor 5, 506)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. This painting started in very vivid blues, greens, and oranges before it was largely covered with gray. It sits right next to another of his works, The Piano Lesson (1916), in a gallery dedicated to the artist. The Piano Lesson is a portrait of Matisse’s son Pierre in the family’s living room, where Woman on a High Stool can be seen in the background.
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Lygia Clark, The Inside Is the Outside, 1963 (Floor 5, 507)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Brazilian artist Lygia Clark started out as an abstract painter, later turning to three-dimensional objects. In this sculpture, Clark transforms a sheet of stainless steel into an open volume with no clear front or back, no inside or outside, and no stable form. It is paired with works by Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who explored the relationship “between the space contained within the sculpture and the space situated outside the sculpture.”
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Joseph Stella, First Light, ca. 1928 (Floor 5, 509)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Joseph Stella was born in Italy and came to New York at age 19, often traveling between the United States and Europe. This painting is in a gallery focused on modernist depictions of the American landscape. While many of the artists here borrow from styles and techniques developed in Europe, the center of the movement in the 1910s through 1930s, they bring an unmistakably American flair to their subject.
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Agnes Pelton, The Fountains, 1926 (Floor 5, 509)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. A more mystical approach to landscape painting can be found in this nearly abstract work by Agnes Pelton. Located in the same gallery as the Stella, the piece demonstrates the breadth of ways American modernists depicted nature.
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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 © 2024 Jacob Lawrence/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” of which this work is a part, comprises 60 paintings on board depicting the exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North beginning in the 1910s. In the series, Lawrence used sequential images and descriptive titles to tell the story of a defining Black experience.
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José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940 (Floor 5, 522)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 José Clemente Orozco/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico. This six-panel mural by Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco has been on view at MoMA since its 2019 reopening. It has a long history with the museum, having been commissioned by the institution in 1940 for the exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.” Executed over the course of just 10 days, it is an ominous depiction of the machinery of war. This year—in keeping with Orozo’s design for the work—the painting’s panels were rearranged. The new configuration, appropriately, emphasizes chaos over unity.
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Jean-Michel Frank, Chess Table, 1929 (Floor 5, 530)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Though this chess table is only for looking at, it is a rewarding sight. Jean-Michel Frank, a designer and interior decorator, created it specifically for a set of chess pieces—also in MoMA’s collection—by the artist Man Ray.
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Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, 1974 (Floor 4, 400)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Before a condemned house in Niagara Falls, New York, was demolished by the City Planning Commission, Matta-Clark took the facade and cut it into sections; Bingo is composed of three of those sections. Currently it can be seen in a gallery with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the museum’s garden and surrounding streets, which is appropriate given that Matta-Clark’s practice was rooted in real-world experiments. The work is paired with the film Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown, which shows a performer, suspended by mountaineering equipment, walking down the wall of a SoHo building. Both pieces represent the artists’ interaction with the built environment—a topic of particular interest to artists in the 1970s.
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Yente (Eugenia Crenovich), Tapestry no. 6, 1958 (Floor 4, 401)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © Yente (Eugenia Crenovich). Courtesy of the Estate of Yente (Eugenia Crenovich). Eugenia Crenovich, who went by Yente, was the daughter of Russian immigrants who settled in Argentina in the late 19th century. She was part of a few artist groups in the 1940s and ’50s, including Argentine’s Arte Concreto movement. Then, in 1956, she began a series of tapestries of which this work is one. In this work, acquired by MoMA in 2019, she embellishes a painted panel with wool thread to make a new kind of abstract painting. Sharing a gallery with the likes of Jackson Pollock’s large-scale paintings, it’s in dialogue with the language of Abstract Expressionism.
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Robert Frank, Profile, Venice, 1952 (Floor 4, 402)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. MoMA’s “Fields and Figures” gallery brings together a selection of both figurative and abstract works made in New York in the 1950s. It focuses on the group of avant-garde artists working at that time known as the New York School, which included the Abstract Expressionists but also photographers like Robert Frank. Here, Frank’s black-and-white photographs are paired with one of Barnett Newman’s color field paintings and other abstract works.
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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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Brice Marden, Couplet IV, 1988–89 (Floor 4, 407)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. MoMA honors abstract painter Brice Marden’s life and career in this gallery, which features a selection of his works. In nearby Gallery 404, earlier calligraphic abstractions by artists such as Mira Schendel and Kumi Sugaï contextualize Marden’s oeuvre.
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James Rosenquist, Doorstop, 1963 (Floor 4, 412)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York. 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. In the fall, it is slated to move to a gallery devoted to Coenties Slip, where a group of artists settled in a three-block area on the southern tip of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s. There, the likes of Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman, among others, had studios in the cheap lofts along the city’s waterfront.
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Kate Millett, Piano & Stool, 1965 (Floor 4, 412)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, 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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John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem, 1968 (Floor 4, 414)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 John Giorno. 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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T.C. Cannon, Two Guns Arikara, 1973/1977 (Floor 4, 415)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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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Donna-Lee Phillips, Fragments from a Visual Journal (16 November, 1977–12:00 pm), 1977 (Floor 4, 419)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork © 2024 Donna-Lee Phillips. This photo is in the “Photography and Language,” titled after a project initiated by the artist Lew Thomas in 1976. That year Thomas sent out a call for submissions for an exhibition that stated, “We are [soliciting] all types of photography in which words and images are joined in a visual presentation.” The show, which opened in San Francisco, was accompanied by a book designed by Donna-Lee Phillips and edited by Thomas. Though the original exhibition focused on Bay Area photographers, this gallery features photographic works by a range of artists who have been influenced by Conceptual art.
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Isa Genzken, Red-Yellow-Black Double Ellipsoid ‘Twin’, 1982 (Floor 2, 203)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nearby, a gallery titled “Random Access Memory” focuses on the technological advances at the end of the cold war in the 1980s, and the military origins of the computing tools we now use every day. Here, a sleek but vaguely threatening piece by Isa Genzken, designed with the help of a computer programmer, seems to hover between anxiety over, and optimism about, those technologies.
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Mike Kelley, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991/1999 (Floor 2, 207)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. In this large-scale installation by Mike Kelley, stuffed animals have been sewn together into planetlike orbs that hang from the ceiling. They are flanked by 10 abstract sculptures that release a pine-scented mist into the air. As with much of Kelley’s work what at first seems like a playful artwork becomes, on closer inspection, a darker commentary on our country’s collective id.
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Montien Boonma, House of Hope, 1996–97 (Floor 2, 211)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. This work, a templelike structure, is made almost entirely of spices and aromatic herbs, made into beads or painted as a wash on the walls. Boonma made this work after his wife’s death from cancer in 1995. Her diagnosis the year prior had led to Boonma’s immersing himself in Buddhist devotional practices. This work considers death but is not entirely dark, intended as it is to bring a feeling of hope and comfort to the viewer.
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Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Witches are Flowers Sis, 2020 (Floor 2, 215)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Like a traditional Chinese handscroll, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s Witches Are Flowers Sis stretches horizontally, spanning roughly 25 feet. Joining disparate subjects such as botanical motifs and images of violence against women with short texts, the work is intended to act something like protective spell for trans and queer people. It’s on view in the “Clandestine Knowledge” gallery, which considers how knowledge is passed down. Here it shares space with ceramic piece by Rosemarie Trockel, a large Kerstin Brätsch sculpture, a tapestry by Otobong Nkanga, a Hilma af Klimt painting, among other works by women artists.
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Julia Lohmann, “Waltraud” Cow-Bench, 2004 (Floor 2, 216)
Image Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artwork copyright © 2024 Julia Lohmann/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Germany. 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 big data. Here, Lohmann asks us to consider our relationship to other animals and to the products and byproducts of the meat industry.
Paul Cézanne, The Bather, ca. 1885 (Floor 5, 503)
![A brushy painting of a man in swimming briefs with his hands on his hips as he looks down.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Paul Cézanne’s painting of a young male bather is atmospheric and rooted in Impressionism. Here, the artist renders perspective solely through the application of various shades of blue and gray. The work had been on view with some of its peers in a gallery dedicated to MoMA’s very first exhibition, “Van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, and Gauguin,” staged in November 1929. It can now be found in gallery 503, in company with its Cubist successors.
Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Joseph Roulin, 1889 (Floor 5, 504)
![A painting of a man with a lush, flowing beard, wearing a blue jacket and blue hat that reads 'Postes'; behind him is a green floral background.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
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. Like Cézanne’s Bathers, it had been on view in a gallery dedicated to that show. It subsequently moved to gallery 504, which revolves around the Vienna Secession art movement formed by a group of Austrian painters at the beginning of the 20th century.
Josef and Jacob Kohn, Child’s cradle (model 1573), ca. 1895 (Floor 5, 504)
![A black beechwood basinet with a spindly top at right.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
This cradle is in the Vienna Secession gallery, which opened in July 2023. There it’s in dialogue with other design objects and furniture, posters from Secession exhibitions, and paintings by artists who were part of the movement, along with some interlopers like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who was a member of the Neue Secession.
This cradle is included as a precursor to many of the works in the gallery. It is durable, light, and innovative in form, and in its construction—it is made from steam-molded bentwood pieces—it presaged the predominant Art Nouveau style of the movement.
Henri Matisse, Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal), early 1914 (Floor 5, 506)
![A painting of a woman sitting on a stool. It is very paired down and in a gray, dreary background.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
This painting started in very vivid blues, greens, and oranges before it was largely covered with gray. It sits right next to another of his works, The Piano Lesson (1916), in a gallery dedicated to the artist. The Piano Lesson is a portrait of Matisse’s son Pierre in the family’s living room, where Woman on a High Stool can be seen in the background.
Lygia Clark, The Inside Is the Outside, 1963 (Floor 5, 507)
![A metal sculpture of curving forms.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Brazilian artist Lygia Clark started out as an abstract painter, later turning to three-dimensional objects. In this sculpture, Clark transforms a sheet of stainless steel into an open volume with no clear front or back, no inside or outside, and no stable form. It is paired with works by Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who explored the relationship “between the space contained within the sculpture and the space situated outside the sculpture.”
Joseph Stella, First Light, ca. 1928 (Floor 5, 509)
![A painting of a large green tree rising above a gray wall at dawn.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Joseph Stella was born in Italy and came to New York at age 19, often traveling between the United States and Europe. This painting is in a gallery focused on modernist depictions of the American landscape. While many of the artists here borrow from styles and techniques developed in Europe, the center of the movement in the 1910s through 1930s, they bring an unmistakably American flair to their subject.
Agnes Pelton, The Fountains, 1926 (Floor 5, 509)
![An ethereal painting of a figure at a crystal ball with a yellow orb behind them.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
A more mystical approach to landscape painting can be found in this nearly abstract work by Agnes Pelton. Located in the same gallery as the Stella, the piece demonstrates the breadth of ways American modernists depicted nature.
Jacob Lawrence, The railroad stations in the South were crowded with people leaving for the North, 1940-41 (Floor 5, 520)
![A pared down painting showing rows of Black people seated at a train station. In front is a row of luggage with a child sitting on one.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” of which this work is a part, comprises 60 paintings on board depicting the exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North beginning in the 1910s. In the series, Lawrence used sequential images and descriptive titles to tell the story of a defining Black experience.
José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940 (Floor 5, 522)
![A six-panel painting showing a chained figure emerging from a machine.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
This six-panel mural by Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco has been on view at MoMA since its 2019 reopening. It has a long history with the museum, having been commissioned by the institution in 1940 for the exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.” Executed over the course of just 10 days, it is an ominous depiction of the machinery of war. This year—in keeping with Orozo’s design for the work—the painting’s panels were rearranged. The new configuration, appropriately, emphasizes chaos over unity.
Jean-Michel Frank, Chess Table, 1929 (Floor 5, 530)
![A wooden chess table with two extensions on either side that are pulled out.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Though this chess table is only for looking at, it is a rewarding sight. Jean-Michel Frank, a designer and interior decorator, created it specifically for a set of chess pieces—also in MoMA’s collection—by the artist Man Ray.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, 1974 (Floor 4, 400)
![Installation view of three cut-out pieces of architecture, showing part of a staircase, the top of an entryway, and a window.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Before a condemned house in Niagara Falls, New York, was demolished by the City Planning Commission, Matta-Clark took the facade and cut it into sections; Bingo is composed of three of those sections. Currently it can be seen in a gallery with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the museum’s garden and surrounding streets, which is appropriate given that Matta-Clark’s practice was rooted in real-world experiments. The work is paired with the film Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown, which shows a performer, suspended by mountaineering equipment, walking down the wall of a SoHo building. Both pieces represent the artists’ interaction with the built environment—a topic of particular interest to artists in the 1970s.
Yente (Eugenia Crenovich), Tapestry no. 6, 1958 (Floor 4, 401)
![A very vertical abstract painting that has a beige background with many white strokes and pops of color in yellow, purple, green, blue, red and more.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Eugenia Crenovich, who went by Yente, was the daughter of Russian immigrants who settled in Argentina in the late 19th century. She was part of a few artist groups in the 1940s and ’50s, including Argentine’s Arte Concreto movement. Then, in 1956, she began a series of tapestries of which this work is one. In this work, acquired by MoMA in 2019, she embellishes a painted panel with wool thread to make a new kind of abstract painting. Sharing a gallery with the likes of Jackson Pollock’s large-scale paintings, it’s in dialogue with the language of Abstract Expressionism.
Robert Frank, Profile, Venice, 1952 (Floor 4, 402)
![A black-and-white photograph shot over a man's shoulder of two women in profile.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
MoMA’s “Fields and Figures” gallery brings together a selection of both figurative and abstract works made in New York in the 1950s. It focuses on the group of avant-garde artists working at that time known as the New York School, which included the Abstract Expressionists but also photographers like Robert Frank. Here, Frank’s black-and-white photographs are paired with one of Barnett Newman’s color field paintings and other abstract works.
Mark Rothko, No. 1 (Untitled), 1948 (Floor 4, 403)
![An abstract painting with a beige background and various shapes in white, yellow, faded lime, ochre, and more.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
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.
Brice Marden, Couplet IV, 1988–89 (Floor 4, 407)
![A vertical abstract painting with various lines in yellow, blue, gray, and mint green.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
MoMA honors abstract painter Brice Marden’s life and career in this gallery, which features a selection of his works. In nearby Gallery 404, earlier calligraphic abstractions by artists such as Mira Schendel and Kumi Sugaï contextualize Marden’s oeuvre.
James Rosenquist, Doorstop, 1963 (Floor 4, 412)
![A ceiling-hung sculpture showing the floor plan of a three bedroom apartment with lightbulbs drilled in various parts.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
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. In the fall, it is slated to move to a gallery devoted to Coenties Slip, where a group of artists settled in a three-block area on the southern tip of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s. There, the likes of Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman, among others, had studios in the cheap lofts along the city’s waterfront.
Kate Millett, Piano & Stool, 1965 (Floor 4, 412)
![A piano that has a stool with legs and has two eye-like appendages above the keys.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
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.
John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem, 1968 (Floor 4, 414)
![An archival photograph of three people in an art gallery who are on rotary phones listening to poems.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
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.”
T.C. Cannon, Two Guns Arikara, 1973/1977 (Floor 4, 415)
![A painting of a dark-skinned Indigenous man seated in a green-gold chair. He holds two pistols and is set against a two-tone purple background.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
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.
Donna-Lee Phillips, Fragments from a Visual Journal (16 November, 1977–12:00 pm), 1977 (Floor 4, 419)
![A gelatin silver print of a woman sitting on a stool, wearing a black tee that reads 'I AM AN IMAGE' with text on the side.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
This photo is in the “Photography and Language,” titled after a project initiated by the artist Lew Thomas in 1976. That year Thomas sent out a call for submissions for an exhibition that stated, “We are [soliciting] all types of photography in which words and images are joined in a visual presentation.” The show, which opened in San Francisco, was accompanied by a book designed by Donna-Lee Phillips and edited by Thomas. Though the original exhibition focused on Bay Area photographers, this gallery features photographic works by a range of artists who have been influenced by Conceptual art.
Isa Genzken, Red-Yellow-Black Double Ellipsoid ‘Twin’, 1982 (Floor 2, 203)
![Two sculptures of lacquered wood with various stripes.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Nearby, a gallery titled “Random Access Memory” focuses on the technological advances at the end of the cold war in the 1980s, and the military origins of the computing tools we now use every day. Here, a sleek but vaguely threatening piece by Isa Genzken, designed with the help of a computer programmer, seems to hover between anxiety over, and optimism about, those technologies.
Mike Kelley, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991/1999 (Floor 2, 207)
![An installation with hanging sculptures and wall-hung sculptures that jut out the wall.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
In this large-scale installation by Mike Kelley, stuffed animals have been sewn together into planetlike orbs that hang from the ceiling. They are flanked by 10 abstract sculptures that release a pine-scented mist into the air. As with much of Kelley’s work what at first seems like a playful artwork becomes, on closer inspection, a darker commentary on our country’s collective id.
Montien Boonma, House of Hope, 1996–97 (Floor 2, 211)
![An op-art installation of streel rods over red-painted beams with abstract cloud-like explosions on the wall.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
This work, a templelike structure, is made almost entirely of spices and aromatic herbs, made into beads or painted as a wash on the walls. Boonma made this work after his wife’s death from cancer in 1995. Her diagnosis the year prior had led to Boonma’s immersing himself in Buddhist devotional practices. This work considers death but is not entirely dark, intended as it is to bring a feeling of hope and comfort to the viewer.
Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Witches are Flowers Sis, 2020 (Floor 2, 215)
![A very horizontal drawings showing various scenes.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
Like a traditional Chinese handscroll, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s Witches Are Flowers Sis stretches horizontally, spanning roughly 25 feet. Joining disparate subjects such as botanical motifs and images of violence against women with short texts, the work is intended to act something like protective spell for trans and queer people. It’s on view in the “Clandestine Knowledge” gallery, which considers how knowledge is passed down. Here it shares space with ceramic piece by Rosemarie Trockel, a large Kerstin Brätsch sculpture, a tapestry by Otobong Nkanga, a Hilma af Klimt painting, among other works by women artists.
Julia Lohmann, “Waltraud” Cow-Bench, 2004 (Floor 2, 216)
![Installation view of a museum gallery showing a sculpture of an animal's torso, with a 3-by-3 photo grid and a Google Maps pin on the wall.](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
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 big data. 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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