MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art connects people from around the world to the art of our time. Sun–Fri, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Sat, 10:30 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
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The Museum is closed for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Plan your visit → mo.ma/tickets

Artist Jacob Lawrence was born on this day in 1917. In 1941, Lawrence, then just 23 years old, completed a series of 60 ...
09/07/2026

Artist Jacob Lawrence was born on this day in 1917.

In 1941, Lawrence, then just 23 years old, completed a series of 60 small tempera paintings with text captions on the subject of the Great Migration, the mass exodus of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began during World War I. Lawrence himself was a child of migrants, and had lived in Harlem since the age of 13.

Before picking up a paintbrush, he spent months at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Black Culture) studying historical documents, books, photographs, journals, and other printed matter.

The resulting work, “The Migration Series” (1940–41), which moved between scenes of terror and images of resilience, offered a radically new vision of contemporary Black experience.

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Jacob Lawrence. [1] “The migrants arrived in great numbers.” [2] “They also worked in large numbers on the railroad.” [3] “The World War had caused a great shortage in Northern industry and also citizens of foreign countries were returning home.” [4] “In the North the Negro had better educational facilities.” All works 1940-41. Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. © 2026 Jacob Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

09/06/2026

🎾 What makes an everyday tennis ball a masterpiece of design?

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in our Department of Architecture and Design, explains why the Wilson Sporting Goods Co. Tennis Ball is in MoMA’s collection.

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Unidentified Designer. Tennis Ball. c. 1870. Manufactured by Wilson Sporting Goods Co., USA - a brand of Amer Group, Finland. Gift of the manufacturer.

📣 Don’t miss “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream,” closing on September 12!🪾 “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream” celebrates F...
09/05/2026

📣 Don’t miss “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream,” closing on September 12!

🪾 “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream” celebrates Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—two of Mexico’s most beloved icons of 20th-century art—in a first-of-its-kind collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera.

Organized in conjunction with The Metropolitan Opera's production of “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” MoMA invited Jon Bausor, the set and co-costume designer of the opera, to create a dramatic environment for the iconic artworks of Kahlo and Rivera.

Step onto the stage with Frida and Diego one last time before it closes!

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Installation view of the exhibition “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream,” March 21, 2026 - September 12, 2026. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Jonathan Dorado.

09/04/2026

🌽 Which detail of Salvador Dalí’s “Retrospective Bust of a Woman” is your favorite?

🥖 The idea for this work began when Salvador Dalí discovered an inkwell illustrated with the praying couple from Jean-Francois Millet’s painting “The Angelus.” He embedded the inkwell in a loaf of bread and placed them both on the portrait bust of a woman. A strip of images from an early cinematic toy called a zoetrope encircles her neck.

🐜 See the sculpture and discover every detail in our fifth-floor galleries.

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Salvador Dalí. “Retrospective Bust of a Woman.” 1933 (some elements reconstructed 1970). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and gift of Philip Johnson (both by exchange). © 2026 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Look closely at these paperweights! 🔎Artist Louise Lawler established her signature style in the early 1980s, when she b...
09/03/2026

Look closely at these paperweights! 🔎

Artist Louise Lawler established her signature style in the early 1980s, when she began taking pictures of other artists’ works displayed in museums, storage spaces, auction houses, and collectors’ homes. With these photographs, she sought to question the value, meaning, and use of art.

An integral aspect of Lawler’s approach is continuously re-presenting, reframing, or restaging her work. Through this strategy she revisits her own pictures by transferring them to different formats, including making her photographs into paperweights like the ones shown here.

Visit our second-floor galleries to explore these works now on view!

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Louise Lawler. [1] “Untitled (Salon Holder).” 1992. Gift of Elizabeth Kessenides. © 2026 Louise Lawler. [2] “Untitled (Wheel). 1999. Bequest of Kynaston McShine. © 2026 Louise Lawler. [3] “Untitled (Flavin).” 1995. Gift of Elizabeth Kessenides. © 2026 Louise Lawler.

🐝 How did forty thousand bees help create this artwork?To make this vase, artist Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny constructed vas...
09/02/2026

🐝 How did forty thousand bees help create this artwork?

To make this vase, artist Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny constructed vase-shaped beehive scaffolds (removed at the end of the process) and then let nature take its course: a group of bees went to work building a hive, layer by layer, in the same shape as the scaffold. It took one week and approximately forty thousand bees to complete this particular Honeycomb Vase.

The process, which the designer calls “slow prototyping,” poetically brings a natural phenomenon full circle. It starts with flowers, which nourish bees and enable them to produce the vase, and ends with a vessel—that is meant to contain flowers.

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Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny. “The Honeycomb Vase ‘Made by Bees" (Prototype).’” 2006. Gift of The Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Foundation. © 2026 Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny.

📬 When was the last time you wrote someone a letter?💌 To celebrate World Letter Writing Day, we’re exploring the importa...
09/01/2026

📬 When was the last time you wrote someone a letter?

💌 To celebrate World Letter Writing Day, we’re exploring the importance of letters to Vincent van Gogh.

The artist wrote hundreds of letters over the course of his life. These offer direct insight into his artistic process. In one, Van Gogh wrote, “There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” He connected art-making with human connection and care, even in moments of uncertainty.

In another letter, he acknowledged the emotional intensity of his creative life, writing, “I put my heart and soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.” Rather than distancing art from vulnerability, Van Gogh understood creativity as something bound up with feeling, effort, and risk.

His letters to family and friends helped him think through his work and sustain relationships during periods of isolation. That same attentiveness can be felt in this painting, “Portrait of Joseph Roulin,” a portrait of a friend who was a postal employee. Van Gogh’s letters remind us that writing can be a place to think aloud, be honest, and stay connected.

📖 Read more about art letter writing as an artful practice on here 👉 https://mo.ma/45ZwgL7

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Vincent van Gogh. “Portrait of Joseph Roulin.” Arles, early 1889. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Rosenberg, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mr. and Mrs. Armand P. Bartos, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, Mr. and Mrs. Werner E. Josten, and Loula D. Lasker Bequest (all by exchange).

📷 Shown here: Artist Man RayMan Ray’s artistic beginnings can be traced to the Dada movement. Dada artists shared a prof...
08/31/2026

📷 Shown here: Artist Man Ray

Man Ray’s artistic beginnings can be traced to the Dada movement. Dada artists shared a profound disillusionment with traditional modes of art making and often turned instead to experimentation. In his photograms, Man Ray embraced the possibilities for irrational combinations and chance arrangements of objects. Around the same time, Man Ray’s experiments with photography carried him to the center of the emergent Surrealist movement in Paris.

Working across mediums and historical movements, Man Ray was an integral part of The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition program early on. His photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, films, and even a chess set were included in landmark early exhibitions at the museum.

♟️ You’ll find Ray’s “Chess Set” and more works by the artist on display in our fifth-floor galleries!

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Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky). “Self-Portrait with Camera.” 1931. Gift of James Thrall Soby. © 2026 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

⌛ Last call for a summer time visit to MoMA! 👥 Get your friends together and come to the museum for the day.👀 Swing by t...
08/30/2026

⌛ Last call for a summer time visit to MoMA!

👥 Get your friends together and come to the museum for the day.

👀 Swing by the Sculpture Garden to see Pierre Huyghe’s immersive, otherworldly installation “UUmwelt” on view through November 29, then grab an ice cream or a cool drink and enjoy the sunshine.

🎞️ After that, catch a movie from our “Immigrant Nation” series and get a first look at the newly installed “It’s Alive! A Century of Animation from the Collection” outside the theater.

↗️ Then, head up to the third-floor to explore “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa.”

🗓️ Don’t forget to stop by “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream,” before it closes on September 12!

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Malick Sidibé. “Les Amis (Friends).” 1976. Gift of Jean Pigozzi. © 2026 Malick Sidibé. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

08/29/2026

🌃 When the sun goes down, the projector lights up in our Sculpture Garden for screenings of genre classics, new restorations, and provocative documentaries.

Don’t miss your last chance to enjoy cinema under the stars this summer at a Sculpture Garden screening of “Le Havre” on September 2 at 7:30 p.m.

Inspired by French poetic realism of the 1930s, Aki Kaurismäki’s “Le Havre” takes us to the titular port city, where we meet Marcel Marx, an elderly shoeshiner and struggling writer named after a famous revolutionary socialist, and his wife Arletty.

🎟️ Get your tickets to “Le Havre” under the stars here 👉 mo.ma/4wXBFgR

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Video from previous screening, featuring Our Latin Thing. 1972. UK/USA. Directed by Leon Gast. DCP. In English, Spanish; English subtitles. 102 min.

08/28/2026

Lucas Samaras assembled this prickly piece out of household items including pins, scissors, a table knife, and a razor blade🍴

Look at (but don’t touch…) “Book 4” on our fourth floor now.

🎧 Download the free Bloomberg Connects app to your mobile device and select MoMA’s guide to listen to fresh perspectives on MoMA’s dynamic collection.

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Lucas Samaras. [1] “Book 4.” 1962. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2026 Lucas Samaras. [2] “Auto Polaroid.” 1969-71. Gift of Robert and Gayle Greenhill. © 2026 Lucas Samaras. [3] “Untitled.” 1960-61. Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund. © 2026 Lucas Samaras. [4] “Photo Transformation #6469.” 1976. Gift of the American Art Foundation. © 2026 Lucas Samaras.

“I am an obsessional artist.” — Yayoi KusamaToday we remember artist Yayoi Kusama, who died in Japan at the age of 97. A...
08/27/2026

“I am an obsessional artist.” — Yayoi Kusama

Today we remember artist Yayoi Kusama, who died in Japan at the age of 97. A vital part of New York’s avant-garde art scene from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, Kusama developed a distinctive style through public performances, paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photocollages, and full-room installations that explored her interest in infinity and “the vastness of the universe.”

In 1998, MoMA presented the exhibition "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968," and today we are delighted to have strong holdings of her work. But Kusama's history at MoMA will always be best remembered for her staging of an unauthorized Happening in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden in August 1969.

For “Grand O**y to Awaken the Dead at MoMA,” Kusama instructed the naked performers to embrace each other while playfully engaging the sculptures around them. By staging a bacchanalian romp among live humans and static sculptural forms, Kusama critiqued MoMA as a repository for “dead” art in need of more living artists’ activations.

Over the following half-century, Kusama's example inspired and transformed museum practice across the world.

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View of the performance, Yayoi Kusama’s “Grand O**y to Awaken the Dead,” August 25, 1969. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

🐕 How do dogs factor into Japanese artist Yosh*tomo Nara’s work?To celebrate International Dog Day, swipe through to see...
08/26/2026

🐕 How do dogs factor into Japanese artist Yosh*tomo Nara’s work?

To celebrate International Dog Day, swipe through to see a pup with a guitar, a dog wearing a crown, and many more canine companions through Nara’s eyes 🐶

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Yosh*tomo Nara. [1] “Spockie.” 2002. Katsko Suzuki Memorial Fund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [2] “Untitled ("No Fun"/Dog) from the series ‘Time of My Life’.” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. [3] “Untitled (Dog with headphones) from the series ‘Time of My Life’.” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [4] “Untitled (Dogs on Japanese character) from the series ‘Time of My Life.” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [5] Untitled (Dog and bone) from the series ‘Time of My Life.’” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [6] “Untitled (White Dog/"They don't make sense...") from the series ‘Time of My Life.’” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [7] “Untitled (childlike dog in crude house) from the series Time of My Life’.” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [8] “Untitled ("Red Roof Dog House") from the series ‘Time of My Life’.” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [9] “Untitled (Dog with Japanese writing) from the series ‘Time of My Life’.” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara. [10] “Untitled (Pup with guitar) from the series ‘Time of My Life’.” 1992–2000. Gift of David Teiger in honor of Agnes Gund. © 2026 Yosh*tomo Nara.

“No. 1 (Untitled)” signals a shift in Mark Rothko’s practice. Here, Rothko applied thin washes of paint to canvas to cre...
08/25/2026

“No. 1 (Untitled)” signals a shift in Mark Rothko’s practice.

Here, Rothko applied thin washes of paint to canvas to create irregular forms that ebb and flow across the picture plane, marking Rothko’s transition from working in a Surrealist mode to focusing on the relationship between space, color, and scale in abstract paintings.

Its large size and abstract style foreshadowed the artist’s signature Color Field paintings, which he began making a year after completing this work.

🖼️ Did you know that we have an entire gallery on our fourth floor devoted to Mark Rothko’s work? Plan your visit to explore more!

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Mark Rothko. “No. 1 (Untitled).” 1948. Gift of the artist. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

08/24/2026

How does an animator bring an illustration to life?

Animator Kohana Wilson walks (or should we say, cartwheels?) through the tools, techniques, and principles behind classic paper animation, from sketch to finished animated sequence.

🖼️ Looking to see more hand drawn animation? Come visit the exhibition "It's Alive! A Century of Animation from the Collection" on view at MoMA through Summer 2027.

📺 Head to the link to watch more from this tutorial and learn the fundamentals every animator should know 👉 mo.ma/4qrz11b

🎂 Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on this day in 1908 in France.In the early 1930s, Cartier-Bresson helped d...
08/22/2026

🎂 Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on this day in 1908 in France.

In the early 1930s, Cartier-Bresson helped define photography’s creative potential by making magical images from fleeting moments of everyday life.

After World War II, he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines while retaining control over their work. Cartier-Bresson soon earned wide acclaim for his photographs of newly independent India and Indonesia, China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, the United States during the postwar boom, and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities.

🔎 Look closely: Can you tell where this photo was taken?

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Henri Cartier-Bresson. “The Museum of Modern Art, New York.” 1964. Gift of the artist. © 2026 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

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