MoMA’s Makeover Rethinks the Presentation of Art

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/arts/design/moma-redesign-art-expansion.html

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The final design for the Museum of Modern Art’s $400 million expansion project, which will be officially unveiled on Thursday, is striking and provocative less because of its look than its implicit message: MoMA isn’t modern yet.

Under the new plans, the museum is moving away from discipline-specific galleries that feature established artists — many of them white men — and toward more chronological and thematic approaches that include multiple formats as well as more minority and female artists.

Museum executives also want to update and streamline their Midtown Manhattan building once and for all, after several iterations over the years. The most recent — an $858 million reconfiguration in 2004 by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi — resulted in congestion and overcrowding.

The new design calls for more gallery space and a transformed main lobby, physical changes that, along with the re-examination of art collections and diversity, represent an effort to open up MoMA and break down the boundaries defined by its founder, Alfred Barr.

“It’s a rethinking of how we were originally conceived,” Glenn D. Lowry, the museum’s director, said in an interview at MoMA. “We had created a narrative for ourselves that didn’t allow for a more expansive reading of our own collection, to include generously artists from very different backgrounds.”

Whereas galleries were formerly labeled according to discipline — architecture, photography — now each floor will represent a rough chronological moment. A floor devoted to the 1920s and ’30s, for example, will include photography as well as drawings, paintings and sculpture.

“The bulk of the discussion has really been the shift from a system that in some ways was outdated — photography, media — into one in which we’re thinking about the entire presentation as a whole,” said Ann Temkin, the chief curator of paintings and sculpture.

“Today we’re saying: Of course there are many histories; the collection represents those many histories,” she added. “Don’t repeat the dogmatism of the past.”

At the same time, the museum will still have discipline-specific galleries.

“Reassurance and surprise,” Mr. Lowry said. “You can have a suite of integrated spaces and discipline spaces together for a much richer experience.”

Curatorially, this kind of reconsideration has already been applied to recent exhibitions like “A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde,” which covered the period of artistic innovation between 1912 and 1935 and included projects in painting, drawing, sculpture, prints, graphic design and architecture.

Similarly, a February rehanging of some of its permanent collection timed to President Trump’s proposed travel ban included books, collage and prints. “It allows us to open the narrative from our own holdings,” said Christophe Cherix, the chief curator of drawings and prints, “to tell different stories.”

And one of the current shows, “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction,” on view through Aug. 13, examines the achievements of female artists between the end of World War II and the start of the feminist movement through paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, textiles and ceramics.

Holland Cotter, in his review of “Making Space” for The New York Times, said he was encouraged by the diversity of the artists in the exhibition, though “much of what’s here is late in arriving at MoMA.”

“It’s time to give the White Guys a rest,” Mr. Cotter wrote. “They’re looking tired.”

With more openness in mind, the project’s architects — Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler — have designed exhibition space, expanded by 30 percent, with a stack of flexible galleries of varying height to accommodate different types of shows and different media.

The first phase of construction, which began in February 2016, was completed this week. It focused on the museum’s east section — reconfiguring 15,000 square feet to create two galleries on the third floor; adding a new first-floor lounge facing the sculpture garden; and extending the historic Bauhaus staircase (using the original materials of terrazzo, glass and steel) to the ground level to restore access to the second-floor galleries.

The renovation, which adds 25 percent more public space, includes a coat check area at street level, improved restrooms and an upgraded Cafe 2, on the second floor, now adjacent to a new museum store and an espresso bar overlooking the garden.

The overall expansion, including the west side, which is under construction, also calls for transforming the main lobby into a light-filled, two-story space with easier circulation, including a walkway that links the new galleries to the renovated east side of the building.

New street-level galleries to the west — one a dedicated projects room, the other a space for contemporary design — will be open to the public free of charge (like the sculpture garden, which has been free since 2013).

There will also be a new studio space for media, performance and film, and a sixth-floor lounge with an outdoor terrace facing West 53rd Street. The MoMA Design and Bookstore will be lowered one level and visible from the street through a glass wall.

The existing galleries on the second, fourth and fifth floors will eventually expand west through 53W53, the residential skyscraper designed by Jean Nouvel, adding 11,500 square feet per floor.

MoMA said it is has raised the money to cover the construction (with the help of a $100 million donation from the media mogul David Geffen) and is now focused on building the endowment.

Throughout the process, MoMA will remain open and continue to present exhibitions. The main lobby entrance on 53rd Street will close as of Sunday, and visitors will enter through the Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder Administrative Building to the east.

The renovation is less about the grand architectural gesture than it is about making MoMA feel like a more responsive place.

“I call it a cross between archaeology and surgery,” said Elizabeth Diller, a founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. “There’s no place to point: That’s the new thing. It’s everywhere.”

The goal of the overhaul is “to expand and enhance the quality of our galleries so we can show more of our collection in new and different ways,” Mr. Lowry said, “to provide more public space and better circulation and whenever possible to connect the museum to its physical location, to open the museum even more to the street.”

As for filling the gaps in its holdings, MoMA has been making what Mr. Lowry described as “strategic acquisitions,” citing as examples recent additions of work by black artists, female artists and Latin American artists.

Programming will also aim to reflect a more nimble MoMA, with galleries turning over more often, museum officials said, trying to elevate collection shows to the level of loan exhibitions.

To mark the opening of the expanded MoMA, in 2019, the entire museum will be devoted to its own collection. But this year, the first exhibition to be presented in one of the two reinvented third-floor galleries is “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive,” which opens June 12, in honor of the 150th anniversary of the architect’s birth.

The Wright show, organized by Barry Bergdoll, includes furniture, tableware, paintings and textiles — in keeping with what the museum’s chairman, Jerry Speyer, said was an evolving approach to the presentation of art.

“It’s a continuation of the whole idea of taking down the silos — less regulation, more fluidity,” Mr. Speyer said. “It’s a better way to show art. It makes more sense.”