moma

Having a job as Senior Library Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art Library has been a big influence on my artistic practice. I use the library for research and inspiration, and as a site of investigation. In early 2010, I began the performance "Smelling the Books", which consists of me smelling every book in the MoMA Library collection. This performance was recently highlighted in New York Magazine as one of the many reasons to love New York.

Hispanic Heritage Week is the first week of October, and this year NY1 featured an article titled “Hispanic Heritage Week: MoMA Helps Preserve Latin American Collections Across City,” on the Survey of Archives of Latino and Latin American Art at The Museum Modern Art.  The article includes a video from an interview with Milan Hughston, Chief of Library and Museum Archives at The Museum of Modern Art.

The Frick Art Reference Library’s Photoarchive consists of more than 1,000,000 reproductions of works of art of the Western tradition dating from the 4th to the mid-20th century. Although photoarchives were the foundation of art historical study in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these extraordinary resources, which allow researchers to review comprehensive holdings of individual artists and regional schools, have become increasingly rare during the past decade. Because of limitations of space, staff, or funds, many photoarchives have been dismantled. Several historic research collections, however, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, have been preserved in part or in their entirety at the Frick Art Reference Library. Scholars, students, dealers, and artists active in New York City now have access to a diverse collection of study photographs in one location.

Anyone who has slaved over a book exhibition for months has probably had that experience when a friend, who is not a "book person," comes to see the show. You can tell from their reaction that the experience is something similar to seeing an art exhibition with the paintings displayed still nailed shut inside their wooden shipping crates. When you go to European museums, you realize how lucky we are in the United States that artworks are not usually displayed behind glass. But books—interactive books, which require someone to handle them in order to make them "work," in order to be able to see and read them—invariably are.

TEN TONS OF ART ARRIVE AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. MUSEUMS ANNOUNCE PROJECT FOR FIRST COMPUTERIZED ARCHIVE OF ART. FIRST MORTGAGE LOANS OBTAINABLE ON HOUSE IN THE MUSEUM GARDEN. SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON ARTISTS’ RELATIONS FORMED. LECTURE ON ART UNDER THE DICTATORSHIPS. CHILD JURY SELECTS PRIZE-WINNING PICTURES AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.

Recent Tweets? No—these are MoMA press releases from the past half-century.

A number of notable individuals began their relationship with MoMA not as noteworthy artists and established personalities, but as conventional Museum employees. Curious? Read on ...

The sequel is a notoriously dicey—though sometimes brilliant—film enterprise, be it Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Empire Strikes Back, or my personal favorite at the age of twelve, The Karate Kid, Part II. After the first round of 30 Seconds videos, in which MoMA staff and members created short videos with filmmaker Thilo Hoffmann, we invited Thilo back late last year. The results are in, and you can now see selected videos by staff and members.

On Thursday, April 22, the MoMA Library and Esopus Foundation Ltd. co-hosted an evening celebrating the life and work of physicist-artist Bern Porter (1911–2004). I organized the event to breathe life into the books and other ephemera on display in the exhibition Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library and to call more attention to this fascinating and under-recognized artist.