How the Museum of Modern Art will evolve with the world

AMENIA — In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and Amenia’s Congregation Beth David will celebrate their 90th anniversaries, both institutions having been founded in 1929. 

Ann Temkin is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and the granddaughter of founding members of the Amenia synagogue. 

On Sunday, Aug. 12, she was at the temple to offer a fascinating and astute talk on “Rethinking modern art,” and MOMA’s reconsidering and reimagining of its collection galleries. 

“I’m here with no notes,” Temkin said at the outset. “People ask me how I can do that. The answer is that this is what I do all day long, and it’s what I think about all day long.” 

What she does, and what she thinks about, at least in part, is “the whole huge question” of modern art’s canon, and the critical role of such an iconic museum in helping to define it. 

Until as recently as five years ago, the focus of art history had been chronological, Eurocentric, white and male. The museum’s collections reflected this, as well as a focus on artistic movements and breakthrough moments in artists’ careers. 

“We don’t relate to this so much going into 2020,” Temkin said. “The question is: What do we do about it?” 

With an expansion underway at the museum — it is set to open in June 2019 — MOMA’s chief curators recognized that this essential question had to be addressed not through temporary exhibitions, but through the collection itself and in the museum’s collection galleries. 

That collection, which had for decades been considered fixed, is newly being understood as something fluid, flexible and evolving, and which may be best considered with an eye to time and space.

As the museum opens onto this new era, Temkin said, much of its expansive collection will come out of hiding and, with it, a broader and more diverse understanding of the canon. 

Historically, MOMA has kept up to 98 percent of its permanent collection in a storage facility in Queens, N.Y., but going forward the work on every floor will change on a semi-annual basis, Temkin said. 

At the end of every three-year cycle, all of the rooms in the collection galleries will have changed in a format that will continually evolve. 

Traditionalists need not worry. Iconic pieces such as “The Starry Night” and “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” will remain on display. 

“A museum would not be relevant any longer without understanding and reflecting the current cultural and historical moment, and we need to put our beliefs and understandings on the walls,” Temkin said. 

With this shift toward displaying the collection in its impressive breadth, women artists, artists of color, artists working in the peripheries, self-taught artists and work from different periods in artists’ lives will all have a place in the canon.

Congregation Beth David plans to host an ongoing series of talks, and “Rethinking modern art,” marked that undertaking’s outstanding beginning. Dynamic, considered and deeply versed in her subject, the curator offered thought-provoking ideas about the challenging questions facing institutions, and how when “what has come before no longer feels adequate,” the opportunity arose for MOMA to broaden and expand the canon.