If Ron Arad’s name isn’t familiar, then chances are his work is, especially if you’ve ever been in stores such as Moroso or Moss in Soho. Arad specializes in seating, designing the familiar Ripple chair, shaped like an infinity sign, and the stacking Tom Vac, a sort of ribbed oval half cocoon. Arad can clearly [...]

Visual artists have long been interested in the stage as an arena for experimentation, and their interdisciplinary collaborations have immeasurably enriched the history of modern art. Stage Pictures presents a selection of designs for dance, theater, and opera from MoMA’s drawings collection. The exhibition highlights set and costume studies, as well as more abstract suggestions [...]

James Ensor (1860-1949) is one of those artists whose name is fairly familiar, but whose work hovers in a mental netherworld of art history. So MoMA’s overview of this Belgian artist offers welcome insight into his weird, intriguing oeuvre that overlapped many influential movements and artists before nestling most comfortably with the expressionists of the [...]

Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West examines how photography has pictured the idea of the American West from 1850 to the present. Photography’s development coincided with the exploration and the settlement of the West, and their simultaneous rise resulted in a complex association that has shaped the perception of the West’s physical [...]

Aside from the thorny subject of race, there’s perhaps been no other aspect of the national culture more contested and argued over than the American West. Even before the spread of photography, dime novels and steel engravings transmitted legends of gamblers and gunslingers, and indigenous natives who were at once noble and bloodthirsty. But it [...]

It’s plain to see what Martin Kippenberger (1953 – 1997) did, judging from MOMA’s fairly comprehensive overview of this German artist. The question is, what didn’t he do? At various stages of his sadly brief life, he had the ambition to be an actor, writer, musician, and artist. He met each with varying success, but [...]

Remember the sad time when MoMA closed its headquarters for renovation, forcing legions to cross the god-forsaken East River to Queens, where it shattered the space/time continuum in a hangar-like aluminum shed? It’s not exactly the same, but some masterpieces from MoMA have transplanted themselves, via giant plastic decals, into the Hades-like Atlantic/Pacific transit complex [...]

This curator’s choice, from The Museum of Modern Art chosen by curator Paola Antonelli, argues that design is not always pretty. In fact, sometimes it is blunt or aggressive — especially when it is meant to deliver a clear message or depart from tradition and express new ideas. The exhibition “Rough Cut” presents a selection [...]

Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927–1937 at MoMA is the first major museum exhibition to identify the core practices and strategies Miró used to attack and reinvigorate painting between 1927 and 1937, a transformative decade within his long career. Taking his notorious claim—“I want to assassinate painting” —as its point of departure, the exhibition explores [...]

In 2007, MoMA mounted a massive forty-year retrospective of Richard Serra’s sculpture – from his earliest creations in rubber and lead to his latest in steel. Once considered a bad boy in the art world, Serra is now one of its favorite sons. Rafael Pi Roman sat down with the world-renowned sculptor talks about his [...]