Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is one of the most internationally well-known art institutions, holder of a vast collection of modern and contemporary art, design objects, and films spanning myriad movements, regions, and cultures. One of the most heavily trafficked New York museums, it is also one of the biggest, at 708,000 square feet, as of 2019. Glenn Lowry has directed MoMA since 1995.

The museum was launched in 1929, with Alfred H. Barr serving as founding director. As MoMA’s leader until 1943, Barr defined the trajectory of modern art as a progression of -isms that came almost exclusively out of Europe; he mounted exhibitions devoted to Pablo Picasso, Mexican muralism, and European modernism’s problematic connections to African art. Crucially, he brought design, photography, and film into the museum’s galleries, at a time when they were not quite yet considered art forms.

In recent decades, however, there have been attempts to revise some of Barr’s modernist art history. When the museum reopened in 2019 following a $450 million expansion, its fully rehung collection globalized modernism to account for many art scenes and identities that Barr had chosen to leave out.

Once the leader of MoMA’s architecture department, Philip Johnson redesigned the museum’s sculpture garden in 1953. MoMA also houses theaters that screen films regularly, and in 2000, acquired a sister institution, MoMA PS1, in Queens.

Many of the several million people who visit MoMA annually come to see well-known masterpieces: Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (1931), among others. Since the 2019 expansion, the displays in the permanent collection galleries have changed far more regularly than they did in the past.