MoMA to Close, Then Open Doors to More Expansive View of Art (New York Times)
Betye Saar’s “Black Girl’s Window” (1969), featured in the exhibition “Take an Object” at MoMA.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times
As the Museum of Modern Art begins the final stage of its $400 million overhaul, it will close for four months this summer and autumn to reconfigure its galleries, rehang the entire collection and rethink the way that the story of modern and contemporary art is presented to the public.
The Picassos and van Goghs will still be there, but the 40,000 square feet of additional space will allow MoMA to focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other overlooked artists like Shigeru Onishi, a Japanese experimental photographer, or Hervé Télémaque, a Haitian-born painter who is now 81.
With the doors closed from June 15 to Oct. 21, the museum will give up summer tourism revenue in the interest of creating a new MoMA that will abandon the discipline-based display system it has used for eight decades.