Faith Ringgold

A new MOCA exhibition reminds viewers of P&D's quilts, wallpapers, and long-overlooked significance

During the 1990s, while pursuing my graduate art history degree at New York University, I worked in the Education Department of the Museum of Modern Art, where I led gallery tours of the museum’s permanent collection for the general public and occasionally VIPs. At that time, the permanent exhibition galleries, representing art produced from 1880 to the mid-1960s, were arranged to tell the “story” of modern art as conceived by founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., beginning with Monet and Cézanne, and then leading into Picasso, Futurism, Surrealism, and Jackson Pollock. According to Barr, “modern art” was a synchronic, linear progression of “isms” in which one (heterosexual, white) male “genius” from Europe or the U.S. influenced another who inevitably trumped or subverted his previous master, thereby producing an avant-garde progression. Barr’s story was so ingrained in the institution that it was never questioned as problematic. The fact that very few women, artists of color, and those not from Europe or North America—in other words, all “Other” artists—were not on display was not up for discussion. Indeed, I was dissuaded by my boss from cheekily offering a tour of “women artists in the collection” at a time when there were only eight on view.

For the last four months, one of the best known art institutions in the country, the Museum of Modern Art has been closed as part of an approximately $450 million renovation.

Whether pairing the two inspires consternation or praise depends largely on how we conceive of the purpose of the Museum itself

It has the world’s finest modern art collection. But now the revered museum is rebalancing its walls – massively boosting work by women and artists of colour

The museum’s unparalleled collection spreads out in an enlarged space with updated stories to tell.

When the Museum of Modern Art reopens on Oct. 21 after a $450-million, 47,000-square-foot expansion, it will finally, if still cautiously, reveal itself to be a living, breathing 21st-century institution, rather than the monument to an obsolete history — white, male, and nationalist — that it has become over the years since its founding in 1929.

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, the renovated space includes an additional 165,000 square feet of gallery space, while making the artwork more accessible to the public.

In 1990, Verso Press republished Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman—a now-notorious critique of the 1960s-era Black Power Movement by Michele Wallace, a feminist writer and also the daughter of artist Faith Ringgold—with a new introduction in which the author reflected on lessons learned in the years after her book’s original publication in 1978. “It is my conviction that the only way to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past is to openly discuss them,” Wallace wrote. “Whether in nations, families, or individuals, the practice of being on speaking terms with your past lives is the only thing that makes it possible to trust yourself or anyone else. … The thing that still remained to be worked out was my relationship to my family as a writer and as a woman.”

From one great American institution to another, six works from Glenstone are taking a trip along the Potomac to be displayed at the Reach, the Kennedy Center’s new expansion, which opens to the public this weekend. Starting on September 7th, the works, ranging from aluminum paintings to mixed media on wood, will be on view alongside four other permanent pieces.