Ask the Curator: Raj Roy and New Directors/New Films
Rajendra Roy. Photo: Scott Rudd
With preparations underway for New Directors/New Films—now less than a week away, the festival has been generating buzz since the lineup was announced earlier this month—and a nice write-up in yesterday’s New York Times piece about young curators making waves in New York City, Rajendra Roy, MoMA’s Chief Curator of Film, is having quite a week. That’s why we’re thrilled he’s agreed to answer some of our readers’ questions in what we hope will be an ongoing feature of our blog. Our curators are a varied and fascinating bunch, and from the looks of our comments, Facebook page, and Twitter feed, so are our online fans. Why not bring the two together and spark a conversation?
So, think about what you’ve always wanted to know about the New Directors/New Films festival or about MoMA’s film program, and submit your questions via comments to this blog post. We’ll select the five most intriguing questions, and Raj will answer them here next Friday, so stay tuned!
Do You Know Your MoMA? 3/19/10
How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in the galleries. If you think you can identify the artist, title, and location of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—next Friday, along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.
ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S CHALLENGE: Read more
4 Comments | Tags: MoMA collection
Baroque Bones and Challenging Loans: How to Ship an Abramović Installation
Six thousand pounds of cow bones after cleaning at Skulls Unlimited.
In late 2008, six thousand pounds of cow bones sat boxed in a Dutch warehouse. Marina Abramović, whose retrospective is on view at MoMA, had requested that we ship the bones, a major component of her installation Balkan Baroque, far in advance of the exhibition. We could not have anticipated that the next fifteen months would involve our learning about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), incineration plants in New Jersey, the dearth of slaughterhouses in the western United States, or that a place called Skulls Unlimited existed. Read more
2 Comments | Tags: Balkan Baroque, cow bones, mad cow disease, Marina Abramović, Skulls Unlimited, USDA
On View: Wangechi Mutu’s “One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack”
Wangechi Mutu. One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. 2004
The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times, a new exhibition organized by my colleagues Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Luis Pérez-Oramas, opened in the Drawings Galleries last week, bringing together a stunning display of works from MoMA’s collection that draw on the motif of mythology. One eye-catching work in the contemporary section of the exhibition is a large-scale collage by Wangechi Mutu titled One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack. She made this work in 2004 during her artist-in-residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and it was acquired by MoMA directly from her soon after our curators saw it on view in the Studio Museum’s exhibition Figuratively.
Though she has also worked in video, sculpture, installation, and, most recently, performance (as part of Performa in 2009), for the past several years Mutu has produced stunning collages of fantastically ornate hybrid women, composed of cut-out images culled from magazines ranging from Vogue to National Geographic, outdated ethnographic surveys, pornography, and botanical illustrations. Mutu is interested in how stereotypes become ingrained into the public conscious, and through her art she investigates gender and racial stereotypes, in particular those pertaining to black women, formulating a distinctly personal position on feminism, postcolonial continental Africa, and globalization. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Luis Perez-Oramas, Performa, The Feminist Future: Theory and Practic in the Visual Arts, The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Wangechi Mutu
Calling All Amateur Shutterbugs…
…your Bill Cunningham–inspired photo could win you a series pass to New Directors/New Films!
Bill Cunningham New York. 2010. USA. Directed by Richard Press. Image courtesy The New York Times and First Thought Films
Legendary New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham—now entering his ninth decade and still riding his Schwinn around Manhattan, snapping pictures of the people and events that captivate our city—stands out in a city of dedicated originals. He’s also the subject of the opening night film of New Directors/New Films 2010, jointly presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA. Now MoMA and FLSC want to give one lucky reader a chance to discover fresh work by emerging filmmakers with a series pass to the festival!
Here’s how it works: You take a picture of your fellow New Yorkers, inspired by Cunningham’s off-the-cuff, street-level style. (Think colorful, spontaneous—cell phone pics welcome!) We’ll pick one at random, and award the lucky photographer a series pass*, plus two tickets to see Bill Cunningham, New York at FLSC on Thursday, March 25. Read more
7 Comments | Tags: Bill Cunningham, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New Directors/New Films, New York, New York Times
Create Ability: An Exhibition of Their Own
Photograph by Michael Nagle
In September, one of the participants of Create Ability, MoMA’s monthly program for individuals with learning or developmental disabilities and their families, asked me, “Why don’t we have our own exhibition?” We were returning to the classroom to create our own art after a gallery tour wherein we’d discussed The Moroccans by Henri Matisse, Harlequin by Pablo Picasso, and the neon-colored sculptures by Franz West outside in the Sculpture Garden. I immediately began gathering artwork created each subsequent month, and on Thursday, March 4, the opening reception for the first exhibition of work produced by Create Ability participants was held. Read more
0 Comments | Tags: Access Programs, Create Ability
