Hello. Again.
On Saturday night I went with my wife and daughter to a preview party in the about-to-reopen galleries at the MoMA.
The museum has been closed all summer for a major expansion and rehanging of the collection, and we have been waiting (and waiting) to get a look.
We walked to the event from our apartment, and as we approached, our hearts sank as a painfully long queue in front of the museum came into view.
There are worse lines to stand in than one full of modern art enthusiasts ready for a party. But it still looked bad.
Once the doors opened, the line moved quickly and within 15 minutes we were inside the entry hall of an entirely new, 90-year-old museum.
The biggest change is the expanded gallery space, where the American Folk Art Museum used to be.
The new space is super-new and super-big. The construction is high-precision. That crispness, combined with the glass, steel and wood materials make it feel like an enormous Apple store.
Turning toward the new galleries from the West 53th Street entrance, one sees a large open space on the ground floor and a sweeping view down into the museum store on the lower level.
On the right, a large mural by American artist Haim Steinbach says “Hello. Again.”
At the far end is an open stairway invites visitors up to the new galleries, and provides new views to the city outside through a glass facade.
In addition to this visual connectedness to the city outside, the museum also attempts to connect through visitor programming.
In the early days, I imagine the the Modern was less secure in its role as an introducer of new art, and had to be serious about its galleries with few diversions.
Nowadays the galleries are only part of the experience. There are Creativity Labs for visitors (including families with small children) to explore ideas and make things, a Studio for live and experimental performances, and the art continues to escape the gallery walls as its formats expand (sculpture garden, film center, museum website, museum publications, etc).
Speaking of reformatting, the MoMA’s permanent collection includes something like 200,000 objects, of which 81,000 are digitized and can be explored via the museum website making them available to more people in more places.
Some of the advance press for the reopening incorrectly prepared me for a thankless, 2019-politics-driven reconsideration of which artists matter now.
I didn’t feel it.
Jasper Johns. Ruth Asawa. Robert Rauschenberg. Anni Albers. They are all still there.
There are new artists too, which I think will become household names over time.
As museum director Glenn Lowry said, MoMA’s new building, like the collection itself, is a continuous work in progress. So although it hasn’t even reopened to the full public yet, this version is also just a version.
The architectural expansion of the MoMA is well-captured in Michael Kimmelman’s recent review in The New York Times. There is a link below, and if you do read it, please be sure to look for the graphic showing the expansion of the museum’s footprint from a small cluster of buildings in 1939 to “the monster that swallowed the block” it is today.
Back to the party.
There was music and drinks and dancing and, from what the bartender told me, 4,000 people were invited. I don’t think everyone attended, or maybe it was the new scale of the place, but it didn’t feel crowded at all. Despite the line to get in.
So I think that makes the new MoMA New York’s oldest, newest, biggest modern art museum.
