Search results for ""Museum of Modern Art""

OBJECT:PHOTO shifts the dialogue about modernist photography from an emphasis on the subject and the image to the actual photographic object, created by a certain artist at a particular time and present today in its unique physicality. This shift is especially significant for a study of the period during which photography developed a distinctive formal language. A growing awareness of the rarity of images made between the two world wars has altered historians’ considerations, encouraging new approaches privileging the originality of each work and the density of references each contains. This richly illustrated publication culminates a four-year collaborative research endeavor between The Museum of Modern Art’s Departments of Photography and Conservation, and nearly 30 visiting scholars, on the material and aesthetic evolution of avant-garde photography in the early twentieth century. The 341 modernist photographs known as The Thomas Walther Collection, a major museum acquisition made in 2001, is presented in its entirety, establishing a new standard of depth for the medium. Essays by curators, researchers, and conservators consider the history of collecting from this era to the present and how deepening knowledge has shifted the perspective on the medium; the material facts of the Walther pictures as a baseline for understanding the development of photographic materials in this era; and how the intellectual formation of the writers of critical photographic publications of the era and the societal and cultural pressures of that historical moment inflected the photography’s sense of its own history. Together with thematic, object-based case studies of groups of pictures that demonstrate new approaches in specific, divergent examples, these contributions reanimate the dialogue on this formative era in photography.

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The Photographer’s Eye, available again after some years out of print, offers a guide to the medium’s visual language through works by such early masters as Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Strand and Weston. In this re-issue, 172 illustrations reveal the extraordinary range of the photograph from the early days of the medium’s development to the mid-1960s. They are accompanied by an essay from Szarkowski, one of the most influential photography curators and critics of our time.

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At the forefront of the social revolution that transformed Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century were three artists whose work had a great impact on the country’s culture and politics: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. This latest volume in the MoMA Artist Series looks at ten important works by these artists represented in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. An essay by art historian James Oles accompanies each work, illuminating its significance and placing it in the context of Mexico’s history and the development of modern art. This volume is an excellent introduction to the art and ideas of these influential artists.

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This is one of a series of books on modern art created to help very young people learn the basic vocabulary used by artists, a sort of ABC of art. This book explores how people are depicted by artists and how they help to convey meaning in art. By looking at the people portrayed in this book and discussing their various characteristics, adults encourage children to develop creative thinking skills. Notes at the back of each book provide brief background information that adults will find useful when talking with children about the images reproduced in these books.

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A collaboration with Gordon; a collection of images and texts from the past forty years that deal with the idea of visual memory, shared visual knowledge and the interwoven texture of imagined and remembered sounds and images. Also explores the relationship between film and psychoanalysis, and the way these systems of thought have affected the idea of individual biography.

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Each volume in this new series offers an in-depth exploration of one major work in MoMA’s collection. Through a lively illustrated essay by a MoMA curator that examines the work in detail, the publication delves into aspects of the artist’s oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and arthistorical context.

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In June 2012, Jasper Johns encountered a photograph of the painter Lucian Freud reproduced in a Christie’s auction catalogue. Inspired not only by the photographic image, but also by the physical qualities of the object itself, Johns took this motif through a succession of cross-medium permutations. He also incorporated into his art the text of a rubber stamp he had made several years ago, to allow him to efficiently decline the myriad requests and invitations that come his way: ‘Regrets/Jasper Johns’. But the stamp’s text also calls to mind the more familiar connotations of regret, such as loss, disappointment, and remorse, invoking an enigmatic sense of melancholy. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of this recent series of paintings, drawings and prints, created over the last year and a half through an intricate combination of techniques, this publication presents each of the sixteen new works in full colour. An essay by Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, MoMA, examine the importance of process and experimentation, the cycle of dead ends and fresh starts, and the incessant interplay of materials, meaning, and representation so characteristic of Johns’s career over the last sixty years.

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Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 examines the beginnings of Ono’s extensive career, demonstrating her pioneering role in visual art, performance and music during the 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition begins in New York in December 1960, where Ono initiated a performance series with La Monte Young in her Chambers Street loft. Over the course of the decade, Ono earned international recognition, staging Cut Piece in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1964, exhibiting at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966, and launching her global War is Over! campaign in 1969. Ono returned to New York in the early 1970s and organized an unsanctioned ‘one woman show’ at The Museum of Modern Art. Over forty years after Ono’s unofficial MoMA debut, the Museum will present its first exhibition dedicated exclusively to the artist’s work. The publication evaluates the broader cultural context of Ono’s early work and features five sections reflecting her geographic locations during this period and the corresponding evolution of her artistic practice. Each chapter includes an introduction written by a guest scholar, artwork descriptions, new interviews with key figures from the time, and a selection of primary documents culled from newspapers, magazines and journals.

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Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream is an exploration of new architectural possibilities for American cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis in the United States. During the summer of 2011, five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers, and landscape designers were enlisted by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and MoMA PS1 to envision new housing infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs. Drawing on ideas proposed in The Buell Hypothesis, a research publication by Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, each team focused on a specific ‘mega region’, a metropolitan area between two major cities, to come up with inventive solutions for the future of housing and cities, to be exhibited at MoMA in Spring 2012. This publication presents each of these proposals in detail, through photographs, drawings, and renderings as well as interviews with the team leaders. With essays by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Reinhold Martin, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, Foreclosed examines the relationship between land, infrastructures, and urban form in today’s cities and suburbs, and presents a potentially different future for housing in the United States.

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Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Talk to Me thrives on an important late 20th-century cultural development in design: a shift from the centrality of function to that of meaning. From this new perspective, objects contain information that goes well beyond their immediate use or appearance, providing access to complex systems and networks and acting as gateways and interpreters. Whether openly and actively, or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us, and designers write the initial script that lets us develop and improvise the dialogue. Talk to Me focuses on objects that involve direct interaction, such as interfaces, information systems, communication devices, and projects that establish a practical, emotional or even sensual connection between their users and entities such as cities, companies, governmental institutions, as well as other people. The featured objects range in date from the early 1980s – beginning with the first Graphic User Interface, developed by Xerox Parc in 1981 – with particular attention given to projects from the last five years and to several ones currently in development. Included are a diverse array of examples, from computer and machine interfaces to websites, video games, devices and tools, and installations. Organized thematically, Talk to Me features essays by Paola Antonelli, Jamer Hunt, Alexandra Midel, Kevin Slavin, and Koi Vinh. By introducing design practices that are becoming increasingly crucial to our world, the book presents a highly distilled sample of today’s best design production that uses technology in creative and unexpected ways, showing how rich and deep design’s influence will be on our future.

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In the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock, now recognized as one of the most important Abstract Expressionist artists, began experimenting with a new method of painting that involved dripping, flinging and pouring paint onto a canvas laid flat on the ground. This process engaged his entire body, and the resulting images were a direct index of the energy he expended to create these works. One: Number 31 (1950), among the largest of the paintings he produced by this method, is a virtuoso showcase of his mastery of materials and technique. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, a lively essay by former museum curator and professor Charles Stuckey offers an in-depth exploration of the painting, one of many groundbreaking works by Pollock in MoMA’s collection.

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